Three Messages and a Warning (28 page)

Karen Chacek (Mexico City, a Saturday in 1972) is an inhabitant of parallel worlds and a storyteller. She spent her childhood surrounded by comics, TV series, and fables. As a teenager, she discovered novels, science fiction, music videos, and film. Her fascination with the visual language drove her to study film. Today she’s a writer and a screenwriter. She has published the short-story collection
Parallel Days
(2006) and the children’s books
An Unexpected Pet
(2007) and
Nina Complot
(2009). Her short fiction has also appeared in various anthologies of chronicle, horror, science fiction, and children’s stories. She has also worked as a video post-producer and written for science, technology, and travel magazines. In 2001 she was invited to participate in the Mexico-Barcelona Sundance Institute workshop. She is passionate about her long walks in public parks, loves cloudy days, insects, cats, underground passages, and dystopias.

Leo Mendoza (Oaxaca, 1958) has published four short-story collections, has edited a few anthologies, and his writing has been included and even translated in others. He has practiced many kinds of cultural journalism and years ago sold kitchen appliances. As a screenwriter he has written many TV programs and two movies: Teo’s Journey (2008), based on his screenplay, and Hidalgo/Molière, ultimately titled Hidalgo: The Untold Story (2009). Mendoza has won several awards such as the San Luis Potosí National Short Story prize and the Benemérito de América in Oaxaca. He won the National Culture and Arts Fund scholarship and in 2006 became a member of the National Creators System. In recent years he has mainly worked as a screenwriter, but also managed to write a collaborative novel about Pre-hispanic Mexico. Currently Mendoza’s main ambitions include reading, eating, watching movies, traveling and having sufficient time to write. In spite of his advancing age he is often astonished, although he now accepts the fact that he will never play center forward on his Atlante soccer team.

Liliana V. Blum (Mexico) is not one of those women who refuse to reveal their date of birth; she just likes coincidences. So that she was born the same year that Heinrich Böll’s
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
was published, is a great one. She is a ginger gal who suffered through her Mexican childhood of pinch-the-redhead-in-the-arm-for-luck. Now she only suffers the sun. She was born in Durango (famous for its scorpions, revolutionaries, and narcos) and currently lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas (famous for its crabs and narco-related violence). Despite the eight-legged creatures, the daily bread of bullets and mutilated bodies, and being the mother of a boy, a girl, a beagle, and a guinea pig, she has managed to write five short-story collections; one of them,
The Curse of Eve and Other Stories
(Host Publications, 2007) was translated into English. Her work has been published in literary magazines in the US, Mexico, England, and Poland. One of her books will be reprinted for a reading campaign in Mexico City, to give away for free in the subway. She is currently working on her first novel.

Lucía Abdó’s story in Spanish is “Segunda calle de Pachuca”—the street she lives on in México City, in the Condesa neighborhood, one of the most representative places of the syncretism of Mexican identity.

María isabel aguirre was born in Mexico City. She holds a B.A. in Spanish literature and reports that she mostly writes poetry but occasionally also writes fiction.

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras (Guadalajara, 1968) is a fiction writer, essayist, poet, and translator. He is the author of the short-story collections
Donde la piel es un tibio silencio
(
Where the Skin is a Silent Warmth
, 1992),
Páginas para una siesta húmeda
(
Pages for a Wet Siesta
, 1992),
Insomnios del otro lado
(
Insomnia on the Other Side
, 1994),
La penumbra inconveniente
(
Inconvenient Darkness
, 2001),
La piel insomne
(
The Sleepless Skin
, 2002), and
Los animales invisibles
(
The Invisible Animals
, 2009), the poetry collections
Mirando cómo arde la amarga ciudad
(
Watching the Bitter City Burn
, 1994) and
Oscuras palabras para escuchar a Satie
(
Dark Words for Listening to Satie
, 1995), and the essay collection
Terra Cognita
(2007). He received the Edmundo Valadés Latin American Short Story Prize in 2000 and the Elías Nandino Poetry Prize in 1993. He has worked as editor and columnist for various journals and cultural supplements, including
Letras Libres
,
Día Siete,
and
El Universal
, and as Director of Publishing of the National Museum of Art in Mexico City. He was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Culture and of the Rockefeller Foundation, fulfilling a residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in 2008.

Mónica Lavín (Mexico City, 1955) has published seven short-story books and seven novels. She won the 1997 Gilberto Owen National Award for her short-story collection
Ruby Tuesday no ha muerto
(
Ruby Tuesday is not Dead
); the 2001 Narrativa de Colima for the best book of the year for
Café cortado
(
Cut Coffee
), and the 2010 Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska for her novel about Sor Juana,
Yo, la peor
(
Me, The Worst, which has been reprinted several times). She is a professor at the Creative Writing Department at the Autonomous University of Mexico City; writes for the newspaper El Universal, and recommends books on radio. Her short stories have been translated to English, French, and Italian and are included in national and international anthologies. She lives in Mexico City and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Óscar de la Borbolla (Mexico City, 1949) is an essayist, novelist, and poet. He received his Ph.D. from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His work has been translated into English, French, and Serbo-Croatian.

Pepe Rojo
(Chilpancingo, 1968) has published four books and more than 200 short stories, essays, and articles dealing with fiction, media, and contemporary culture, including the 2009 collection
Interrupciones
(
Interruptions
). He teaches in the Taller (e) Media program at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) in Tijuana. With Deyanira Torres and Bernardo Fernández, he co-founded Pellejo/Molleja, an indie publishing firm, where he edited
Sub
(sub-genre literature),
Número X
(media culture) and
Pulpo Comics
(a Mexican-sf comics anthology). With Torres, he co-produced and co-directed a series of interventions, “You Don’t Exist,” as well as the video installation series “Psicopanoramas”. He produced two interactive stories (
Masq
and
Club Ciel
) for
Alteraction
, and published two collections of Minibúks (
Mexican SF
and
Counter-versions
) at UABC, as well as the graphic intervention “Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana.” In April and May 2011 he produced a series of sf-based interventions and lectures at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, “You Can See the Future from Here,” with students from UABC, as well as U.S. science fiction writers including Bruce Sterling and Chris N. Brown. He lives in strange Tijuana with his strange Lacanian psychoanalyst wife, Deyanira Torres, and two strange kids (and by
strange,
he of course means “lovely in an endearing and unusual kind of way”).

Queta Navagómez was born in Bellavista, Nayarit, in western Mexico. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Physical Education, a Diploma in Script Writing and Literary Creation from the General Society of Mexican Writers, and a Seminary in Literary Creation from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She represented her country at track and field competitions at the Central American games. She has won several literary awards for her short fiction, poetry, and literary novels (Marie Claire Magazine’s Writing Contest 1995, National Poetry Award “Ali Chumacero,” 2003-2004, National Novel Award “Jose Ruben Romero,” INBA, 2008). Her stories, poetry and novels have been published in journals and anthologies in the U.S.A., Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Chile, and Peru. She lives in Mexico City, where she participates actively in regional and national cultural activities.

René Roquet (Mexico City, 1969) has worked as a gardener, painter, in a parts store, renovator, and bank teller. He has published reviews, literary criticism, and short stories in many newspapers and magazines and in three anthologies.

Yussel Dardón (Puebla, 1982) is author of
Maquetas del Universo
(
Models of the Universe
) and
Fractatus Vitae
. His first book of short stories was described as “shows the brightness of a serious and nuanced work.” He has published in national and international journals and was anthologized in the Spring 2010 number dedicated to “Obsession” from the
Rio Grande Review
, a bilingual publication of the University of Houston. He was selected as a Young Artists Fellow of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts for 2010-11.

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Joan Aiken,
The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
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Stories of Your Life and Others
Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud,
A Life on Paper
(trans. Edward Gauvin)
John Crowley,
The Chemical Wedding*
Alan DeNiro,
Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead
Hal Duncan,
An A-Z of the Fantastic City*
Carol Emshwiller,
Carmen Dog; The Mount
;
Report to the Men’s Club
Karen Joy Fowler,
What I Didn’t See and Other Stories
Greer Gilman,
Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales
Angélica Gorodischer,
Kalpa Imperial
(trans. Ursula K. Le Guin);
Trafalgar*
(trans. by Amalia Gladheart)
Alasdair Gray,
Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers
Elizabeth Hand,
Errantry: Stories*; Generation Loss; Mortal Love*
Kij Johnson,
At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories*
Nancy Kress,
Fountain of Age: Stories*
Kelly Link,
Magic for Beginners; Stranger Things Happen
;
Trampoline
(Editor)
Karen Lord,
Redemption in Indigo: a novel
Maureen F. McHugh,
Mothers & Other Monsters, After the Apocalypse
Naomi Mitchison
, Travel Light
Benjamin Rosenbaum,
The Ant King and Other Stories
Geoff Ryman,
The Child Garden; The King’s Last Song; Paradise Tales; Was
Sofia Samatar,
A Stranger in Olondria*
Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak (Eds.),
Interfictions 2
Ray Vukcevich
, Meet Me in the Moon Room
Kate Wilhelm,
Storyteller
Howard Waldrop
, Howard Who?

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*Forthcoming