CUBA IN SPLINTERS 4 & 5 FEBRUARY 2015 BROWN UNIVERSITY Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Cultures at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, and currently holds the Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholarship at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Art and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her book Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa post-soviética cubana, published by Iberoamericana-Vervuert in 2013, examines, through the lens of literary production, the existential void experienced by Cubans after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc in the 1990s http://blog.ibero-americana.net/tag/odette-casamayor/. She is currently working on a new book, On Being Blacks: Challenging the Hegemonic Knowledge Through Racial Self-Identification Processes in post- Soviet Cuban Cultural Production. Also a fiction writer, Casamayor has published a collection of stories, Una casa en los Catskills (La Secta de los Perros, San Juan, 2012). Walfrido Dorta is a PhD candidate in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages program at The Graduate Center (CUNY). His work focuses on 20th Century Latin American and Caribbean literature, with an interest in intellectual history and critical theory. He has published a book on Cuban poet Gastón Baquero, as well as articles in academic and cultural journals. Dorta’s doctoral dissertation will focus on cultural dynamics in Cuba over the last 30 years, and on the relationship between intellectuals and the State; it will study projects like Paideia, Diáspora(s) and the most recent literature by the authors of the so called Generation Zero. Paloma Duong’s research focuses on the intersection of culture and politics in 20th and 21st century Latin America. She is currently writing about democratic imaginaries, new media, and participatory forms of culture in post-Cold War Cuba, including blogs, performances, and music. Her work and her teaching draw from cultural studies, political philosophy, and literary and media theory to examine the aesthetic dimensions of citizenship, and the history and reception of Marxism, in Latin America. Ahmel Echevarría Peré is a fiction writer, photographer, and editor, who is also webmaster of Vercuba and Centronelio. He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from ISPJAE University, Havana. His books include Inventario (Unión, 2007), Esquirlas (Letras Cubanas, 2006) and Días de Entrenamiento (FRA, Prague, Czech Republic, 2012). He has been included in several Cuban literary anthologies, such as: Los Que Cuentan (Cajachina, 2007), La Ínsula Fabulante: El Cuento Cubano en la Revolución 1959-2008 (Letras Cubanas, 2008) and La Fiamma in Bocca: Giovanni Narratori Cubani(Voland, 2009). His novels Pastel Para Pitbulls, La Noria, and Búfalos Camino al Matadero are to be published this year in Cuba. As a columnist he has collaborated with the independent digital magazine VOCES, Diario de Cuba, The Revolution Evening Post, and the Dialogue Section of the Hermanos Saíz Association. Omar Granados is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse (UWL). He grew up in Havana, Cuba, and studied English Literature at the Universidad de la Habana. He moved to the U.S in 2004 and earned a PhD in Latin America Literature from Emory University in Atlanta. His research interests include Caribbean studies, Cuban and Cuban American studies, contemporary visual culture and film studies and cultural approaches on migration, exile and repatriation. He is the author of several articles and translations on contemporary Cuban and Latin American fiction and film, which have appeared in journals and edited collections. Omar is currently working on a book entitled After Fidel: Culture, Censorship and Dissemination in Post-Soviet Cuba, which examines literary and visual narratives from Cuba and the Cuban diaspora during the Raúl Castro period (2006-2014). He is the Director of the UWL Institute for Latin American Studies. Hillary Gulley is a writer and translator. Raised in West Virginia, she also lived in Spain, Hungary, Cuba and Italy before moving to New York City in 2007. In 2012, she won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her work on Marcelo Cohen’s The End of the Same. In 2013, she was awarded an NEA Fellowship for a July residency at Vermont Studio Center. Her first book is an anthology of Cuban short stories she translated from Spanish entitled Cuba in Splinters, Eleven Stories from the New Cuba, published by O/R Books in April 2014. She teaches composition, narrative and poetry at CUNY—Queens College. Fiction writer, poet, art critic and editor Jorge Enrique Lage was born in Havana in 1981. Currently editor of the magazine El cuentero and the publishing house Caja China (based at the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Literary Training Center), he has published the short story collections Yo fui un adolescente ladrón de tumbas (Extramuros, 2004), Fragmentos encontrados en La Rampa (April, 2004), Los ojos de fuego verde (April, 2005), El color de la sangre diluida (Letras Cubanas, 2007 http://www.sampsoniaway.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/image13- e1374681674842.jpg), Vultureffect (Unión, 2011); and the novel Carbono 14, una novela de culto (Altazor, Perú, 2010). Boris Larramendi is a former member of the legendary Cuban band Habana Abierta, and composer of such landmarks of contemporary Cuban music as Asere, que volá and Siempre Happy. After producing three groundbreaking albums (“Habana Abierta,” “24 Horas,” and “Boomerang”) to great critical acclaim, members of the band continued with their solo careers. In the last decade, Boris Larramendi has produced a series of independent albums that furthered his experimentation with the fusion of Cuban rhythms, funk, hip hop, pop, indie rock, and electronic music. His solo albums include “Yo no tengo la culpa,” (2002), “Libre” (2009), “Felicidad” (2010) and, most recently, La Cibertimba y El Bárbaro (2013). Emily A. Maguire is Associate Professor of Spanish at Northwestern University, where she is also affiliated with the Latina and Latino Studies Program. Her book Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (University Press of Florida, 2011) explores the ways in which Cuban writers in the first half of the twentieth century drew on both ethnography and literature in their re-valorization of Afro-Cuban culture as a source of Cuban- ness. Her articles on contemporary Caribbean Literature, Afrocubanismo, Black Internationalism, Latina/o science fiction, and Cuban cyberpunk have been published in journals such as Small Axe, Revista Iberoamericana, Estudios, and Ciberletras. She is currently at work on a second book project on Caribbean science fiction. Lizabel Monica is coordinator of the international, multifaceted, art, writing and thinking project DESLIZ, as well as of the DESLIZ digital magazine. She has edited many blogs, including CUBA FAKE NEWS, PALADEO IN DELEITE, REVISTA,DESLIZ, BROKEN SPANGLISH, LIZABEL MÓNICA, and LA TAZA DE CAFÉ. A multidisciplinary artist and critic, she is interested in convergences between literature, digital media and the arts; her experimental concepts alternate with narrative texts of high precision and transparency. Mónica, who holds a B.S. in History, is currently a candidate for the PhD at Princeton University. Osdany Morales (Nueva Paz, Cuba, 1981) is the author of two collections of stories, Minuciosas puertas estrechas (David Award 2006), and Antes de los aviones (2013). In 2008 he won the International Prize for Fiction Casa de Teatro in the Dominican Republic. Papyrus (Alejo Carpentier Award 2012) is his first novel. More recent works include Too Much Information, which comes out in the spring of 2015. Morales, who earned a degree in architecture in his native Cuba, also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. His stories have appeared in magazines such as El Cuentero (Cuba), El Perro (Mexico), Ragazine.CC (USA), BuenSalvaje (Peru) and Quimera (Spain). His writing has been included in anthologies about new Cuban literature, such as Maneras de narrar (2006), Los que cuentan (2008), La fiamma in boca (2009) and Malditos bastardos (2014); also in Escribir en Nueva York and Cortázar Sampleado (2014). Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Literature at New York University. Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is a Cuban fiction writer, blogger and photojournalist who is Brown University’s International Writers Project Fellow for 2014-15. Author of five books of fiction, columnist for Diario de Cuba (Madrid), El Nacional (Caracas) and Sampsonia Way Magazine, he is webmaster of the photoblog Boring Home Utopics and the opinion blog Lunes de Post-Revolución (available in English at orlandolunes.wordpress.com). He also edited the Cuban independent digital magazines Cacharro(s), The Revolution Evening Post, and Voces. Born in Havana in 1971, he graduated as a molecular biologist from Havana University and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in 1994. Pardo Lazo has continued his literary and political activities since his arrival in the U.S. In 2014, O/R Books, New York, published Cuba In Splinters, an anthology of Cuban stories edited by Pardo Lazo. In October 2014, Restless Books published his digital photobook, Abandoned Havana, “a collection of surreal, irony-laden photos and texts” about the city’s scaffolded and crumbling