ABOUT
Ilan Stavans has been called "the czar of Latino culture in the United States" by the New York Times and "Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast," by the Washington Post.
Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Literature Prize, the Antonia Pantoja Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. He earned an Emmy nomination as host of the PBS show La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans.
As a descendant of Eastern European Jews who settled in Mexico, Stavans grew up in a multilingual environment. His decade-long study of Spanglish, the hybrid tongue spoken by millions of Latinos in the United States, led to the 2003 publication of his controversial book, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), which has been at the heart of a heated debate in the Hispanic world. The volume was awarded the Latino Hall of Fame award in 2004 for best reference book. In the last chapter, Stavans offers a translation into Spanglish of the first chapter of Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Stavans has also co-edited Lengua Fresca (2006), an anthology of cutting-edge Latino writers, several of whom write in Spanglish.
His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001), and Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), the three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (2004), The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005), and the four-volume Encyclopedia Latina (2005). His fiction includes The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories (2006), which includes the story "Morirse está en hebreo," adapted into the screen as "My Mexican Shiva," directed by Alejandro Springall and co-produced by John Sayles. In 2007 Yale University Press will release his new book, On Love.
He is a regular contributor to newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. He has taught at Columbia University, Oberlin College, and Smith College, among other institutions. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. In 2000, Routledge published The Essential Ilan Stavans and last year, the University of Wisconsin Press released Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations by Neal Sokol.
Dr. Stavans can be reached at istavans@amherst.edu.