Alma Guillermoprieto is widely read in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. She’s considered an authoritative speaker on the cultural and political life of Mexico and South America, especially as they relate to the United States. By tracing the history of Latin America, Alma gives us a glimpse into its future.
Born in Mexico and raised between Mexico and the U.S., Alma Guillermoprieto is a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. In the 1990s, for The New Yorker and other magazines, she wrote a remarkable series of stories on Latin America, covering everything from the Colombian Civil War to the “Dirty War” in Argentina. Later collected into two books, Looking for History and The Heart That Bleeds, these stories form a definitive portrait of Latin America during the “Lost Decade.” Her other books include Samba, about the year she spent with carnival-makers in Rio, and Dancing with Cuba, about the six months she spent teaching dance in Cuba in the 1970s. She has “set the standard for elegant writing in English on Latin America,” according to The New York Times Book Review.
Moderator: Lauren Smart
Lauren Smart is an arts writer and educator based in Dallas. She is the arts and culture editor for the Dallas Observer and an adjunct journalism professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she teaches arts writing and criticism. She has also published poetry in several literary journals. She holds a master’s in arts journalism from Syracuse University and bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English from Southern Methodist University.
Panelist: Darryl Dickson Carr
Darryl Dickson Carr, Ph.D., is professor and chair of English at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, and satire. His research focuses primarily upon the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance and African American satirical works in the 20th and 21st centuries. He has authored Spoofing the Modern: The Role of Satire in the Harlem Renaissance; The Columbus Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction, which won an American Book Award in 2006; and African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel.
Panelist: Lisa Hembry
Lisa Hembry is the president and CEO of Literacy Instruction for Texas. She joined LIFT in 2010 and is a passionate advocate for LIFT’s mission to enhance lives and strengthen communities by teaching adults to read. Prior to LIFT, she served as president and CEO of Dallas iMedia Network, Dallas County Treasurer, and CEO of the Dallas Historical Society. Lisa received her B.S. in political science from Southern Methodist University and her graduate marketing certificate from the Cox School of Business at SMU.
Panelist: Merritt Tierce
Merritt Tierce was born and raised in Texas and received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The National Book Foundation named her a 2013 “5 Under 35” honoree, and she was a recipient of a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her first novel, Love Me Back, was shortlisted for the PEN/Bingham award and won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for First Fiction.
Panelist: Chris Vognar
Chris Vognar is culture critic for The Dallas Morning News, where he has worked since 1996. He was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University and is a contributor to Transition, a quarterly journal of African and African American studies at Harvard. Mr. Vognar co-hosts The Big Screen show on KERA, Dallas’ NPR affiliate. He has taught journalism at Harvard Summer School, film history at the University of Texas at Arlington, and arts journalism at Southern Methodist University. He earned his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley.
