The Publications Unit will host a book launch reading and conversation for Ships in Houston: Stories by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, on Thursday, October 5 at 7 p.m. at the Multicultural Center. The reading will be bilingual in English and Spanish, and a conversation and book signing will follow. Ships in Houston has been nominated for the National Book Award in Translated Literature and the PEN Translation Prize.
This book is the latest release from the Publications Unit’s Downstate Legacies imprint and part of its Undiscovered Americas (UA) translation and lost books series.
The event will also be on Zoom. Please register in advance.
All Undiscovered Americas books are open access and available digitally at no cost via Milner Library’s institutional repository, ISU ReD, but snazzy-looking print books are also available for purchase (purchase information available at the ISU ReD link).
About Ships in Houston
Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of 15 stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the U.S. southern border with Mexico might grab more headlines, these stories take place mostly in Mexico, where stringent immigration policies target Central American migrants, causing them to make fateful—and even fatal—decisions born from desperation, as these migrants live in fear of being deported from Mexico back to Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. Bringing Villafuerte’s work into English for the first time, Ward deftly unfurls the author’s edgy and fragmentary stream-of-consciousness narrative style, creating a translation that is at once as jarring as it is deeply humanizing, giving readers unfettered access to complex characters in just a few page turns. Moving through the extreme push and pull of liminal spaces in Chiapas, Nadia Villafuerte’s stories of everyday horror—and hope—in Ships in Houston will haunt you long after you close the book.
“Rich and compelling, heartbreaking and illuminating, raw, evocative, filled with truth: these stories compel us to see borderlands with new eyes. Nadia Villafuerte is an extraordinary writer, her evocation of migration stories is unparalleled, and in Julie Ann Ward’s beautifully rendered translation, Ships in Houston is an elegant, wrenching tour de force.“
—Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah and Kind of Kin
About the author
Nadia Villafuerte was born in 1978 in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. She studied journalism and music, and she has received fellowships from the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) and the Foundation for Mexican Letters (FLM), both in Mexico. Her publications include three collections of short stories: Preludio (Prelude), Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston), and ¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (Do you Like Latex, Honey?), and the novel Por el lado salvaje (On the Wild Side). Her work has also been anthologized in various collections. She has an MFA in creative writing in Spanish from New York University. Villafuerte lives in New York City, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese languages and literature at New York University.
About the Translator
Julie Ann Ward was born in Oklahoma in 1983. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic languages and literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book A Shared Truth: The Theater of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol was published in 2019 with the University of Pittsburgh Press, and her essays, fiction, and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Dancing with the Zapatistas, PostScript, InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, Theatre Journal, Trans/Modernity, Latin American Theatre Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, and Paso de Gato. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.
About Undiscovered Americas
Undiscovered Americas is an open-access series from Downstate Legacies which was founded in 2016 by Steve Halle as an imprint of the Publications Unit in the Department of English at Illinois State University. It publishes overlooked books from North, Central, and South America, with an emphasis on lost or out-of-print books and books translated into English. UA has an educational mission to make important books available to teachers and students for free in easily accessible electronic formats. Print copies of UA books are also available via print-on-demand.
The event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation; the Illinois State University Foundation Fund; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
For additional information, contact Holms Troelstrup, assistant director of the Publications Unit, at jhtroel@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-3025. Follow the Publications Unit on X (formerly Twitter) @PubUnit_ISU and on Instagram @PubUnit.
