Susana Chavez-Silverman – författare

In this dynamic collection of essays, many leading literary scholars trace gay and lesbian themes in Latin American, Hispanic, and U.S. Latino literary and cultural texts. Reading and Writing the Ambiente is consciously ambitious and far-ranging, historically as well as geographically. It includes discussions of texts from as early as the seventeenth century to writings of the late twentieth century.Reading and Writing the Ambiente also underscores the ways in which lesbian and gay self-representation in Hispanic texts differs from representations in Anglo-American texts. The contributors demonstrate that—unlike the emphasis on the individual in Anglo- American sexual identity—Latino, Spanish, and Latin American sexual identity is produced in the surrounding culture and community, in the ambiente. As one of the first collections of its kind, Reading and Writing the Ambiente is expressive of the next wave of gay Hispanic and Latin scholarship.

A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author's inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional 'crónica' make this memoir compelling and powerful. Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman. Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine's Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.

On a wintry Thursday night in San Francisco, Susana ChÁvez-Silverman catches her first glimpse of a handsome stranger through the window as he passes the infamous Balboa Cafe. She knows immediately he is the man of her dreams. His eyes meet hers, he turns and enters the bar . . .Their attraction was intense, but the social and political climate of South Africa, still in the grip of apartheid, threatened to tear them apart. Describing the vicissitudes of the Latina migratory experience, ChÁvez-Silverman struggles to overcome the hostility of a place that is so unwelcoming to nonwhite persons and outsiders.Heartthrob, a love story for the ages, implores us to consider how things could have been. In these romantic crÓnicas based on detailed diary entries and confessional letters to family and friends, ChÁvez-Silverman weaves together English and Spanish to lay bare the raw intensity and true fragility of love. Anyone who has wondered about the-one-that-got-away or sought out the true meaning of happily-ever-after will be enraptured by this intimate exploration of love, loss, and regret.