New Directions: Liliana Colanzi “You Glow in the Dark”

A new literary series with New Directions Publishing features Bolivian writer sharing her first work translated into English.

This reading and conversation kicks off a new quarterly series here at City of Asylum, brought to audiences in partnership with New Directions Publishing. This March, we welcome Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi to celebrate You Glow In The Dark, an amalgam and masterful collection both haunting and humorous, and her first full-length work made available to English audiences. New Directions (a favorite of COA Bookstore customers) is a NYC indie publisher working to introduce translated international literature to American audiences—including the work of former COA writers-in-residence Osama Alomar and Horacio Castellanos Moya. 

“New Directions Publishing is a sui generis powerhouse of literature, armed with an unwavering artistic vision that perfectly complements our mission at City of Asylum. An NDP release is always fresh, whether it be a nearly forgotten classic or a debut contemporary. To have them join us at Alphabet City to show off Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow In The Dark—in its own right a fantastic work of art—is an indescribable delight. It seems nearly impossible to sum up such a press but suffice to say you will never pick up a publication from New Directions and end up disappointed.” —Phoenix Tefel, COA Bookstore Manager

The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, though Liliana’s writing casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Her materials are dark, but never without her vivid sense of humor. Liliana draws just as much power from Andean cyberpunk as she does classic horror writers, and establishes a stylistic trademark in her simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian Altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends the Aymara language with Spanish. As a result, the book is an ambitious masterpiece in nearly every aspect, seizing the reader’s attention and holding it from start to finish. You Glow in the Dark announces the arrival of a major new talent.

This program will include a short reading by Liliana, who will then be joined for a conversation and audience Q&A with translator Chris Andrews (joining virtually from Australia) and moderator Adriana Ramirez. You can purchase your own copy of Liliana’s book You Glow in the Dark at City of Asylum Bookstore. 

About the Author:

Liliana Colanzi was born in Santa Cruz in Bolivia and has published three collections of short stories. She teaches Latin American literature at Cornell University. She is the founder of Dum Dum publishing house in Bolivia, an indie press focusing on fiction that mixes genres and “has a foot in the jungle and another one on Mars.” She won the 2015 Aura Estrada Prize, awarded to women writers under 35 who live in the USA, Canada or in Latin America and who write in Spanish, and You Glow In The Dark (Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro) won the prestigious Ribera del Duero Prize 2022.

About the Translator:

Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He also taught at the University of Western Sydney, where he was a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating nine books by Roberto Bolaño and ten books (and counting) by César Aira, he also brought the French author Kaouther Adimi’s Our Riches into English for New Directions. Andrews has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. Additionally, he has published the critical studies Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge and Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe as well as two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

About the Moderator:

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub among others. She occasionally reviews books for People Magazine. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous “Nasty Slam” in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant 40 North is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but a cash wine bar will be available.

All attendees of this program will receive a free glow stick!