María Luisa Bombal Lecture
Tue, October 7, 2025 | 11 AM HIB 135
Supported by SPAN101B: Intro to Latin American Literature, taught by Viviane Mahieux.
Keynote Speaker:
Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese.
Lucía Guerra-Cunningham
Lucía Guerra was born in Santiago, Chile, and she is an Emerita Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Irvine. As a critic, she specializes in Critical Theory, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. Her article entitled “Cutural Identity and the Dilemma of Self in Latin American Women’s Literature“ won the Plural Essay Award in 1987. Her book La mujer fragmentada: Historias de un signo was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1994. She has published about seventy critical essays in scholarly magazines in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S.A. In 1979, Lucía Guerra won the Annual Translation Award sponsored by Columbia University and the Council of the Arts, for her book New Islands, a translation of María Luisa Bombal’s work which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1981.
As a fiction writer, Lucía Guerra intends to give voice to women’s silenced experiences; in her writing she denounces social subordination and she explores the subversive power of female eroticism. In 1989, her short story entitled “The Virgins Passion“ obtained the first Prize in the international contest sponsored by the magazine Plural in Mexico. Her collection of short stories entitled Frutos Extraños obtained in 1991 the Premio Letras de Oro sponsored by the University of Miami and the government of Spain. In 1992, Frutos Extraños also won the Municipal Prize of Literature in Chile. In 1997, Lucía Guerra received the Gabriela Mistral Award (Coté-femmes éditions in Paris) for the outstanding quality of her fiction.