THE 17TH ANNUAL BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL
VASUNDHARA
Click here for a detailed schedule of events.
 The 17th Annual Border Book Festival (BBF), VASUNDHARA, will take place April 8-10, 2011 in Mesilla, New Mexico. Vasundhara means Earth in Sanskrit. It also means Mother Earth, The One Who Holds and Sustains Us and Mother Land.
The festival will celebrate Mother Earth/Gaia, in a series of readings, workshops, panels, literary and arts events that will inform, delight and empower audiences of all ages. An art contest will be held to select the 2011 poster and an essay contest will be open to area students. The weekend long festival will highlight the connection between East and West, fusing communalities in a celebration of music, dance and words.
Traditional festival elements include school outreach programs, children’s and family storytelling, a writing workshop for teens as well as adults, panels, interactive writing and arts workshops and the 3rd annual Saturday night musical concert on the Mesilla Plaza as well as the morning Pan dulce and Café de la Olla Open house where the community is invited to visit the Border Book Festival’s home base, The Cultural Center de Mesilla and Galería Tepín, its sister art and photo gallery, to enjoy Mexican pastry and the traditional spiced coffee.
Featured writers include Sandra Cisneros and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Cisneros is the highly acclaimed author of Caramelo and The House on Mango Street. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature. Cisneros' early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between México and the USA instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries ... but not belonging to either culture." The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.
Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.
Divakaruni’ s most recent novel is One Amazing Thing. An award-winning author and poet, her work is widely known, as she has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies. Her works have been translated into 20 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew and Japanese.
She was born in India and lived there until 1976, at which point she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English by receiving a Master’s degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Divakaruni currently teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the Univ. of Houston. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. She serves on the Advisory board of Maitri in the San Francisco Bay Area and Daya in Houston. Both these are organizations that help South Asian or South Asian American women who find themselves in abusive or domestic violence situations. She is also on the board of Pratham, an organization that helps educate children (especially those living in urban slums) in India.
Featured writers Cisneros and Divakaruni are both deeply involved in children’s, women's, human rights and immigrant’s rights issues. At this time of challenge, it is good to remember our commonalities as children of Mother Earth.
We look forward to Vasundhara, the 17th annual Border Book Festival, with its healing panels, workshops, music, dance, talks, readings and interactive creative events for people of all ages. The festival will offer a fusion of Indian/Latino/Chicano/American and World cultures in a festival that highlights global inquiry and a coming together as a universal family.
The Border Book Festival
P.O. Drawer T
Mesilla, New Mexico 88046
575-523-3988
bbf@borderbookfestival.com
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