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.

Other festival featured authors include Martín Espada, Puerto Rican-American poet called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published seventeen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. Two more books are forthcoming: The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), a collection of poems, and The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive (Michigan, 2010), a collection of essays. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Another featured writer is Cuban-American novelist Cristina García, the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador's Hotel, just published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was recently published by Akashic Press.

García's work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into a dozen languages. García is a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She has accepted a permanent position with Texas Tech University as Professor of Creative Writing and will teach there every spring semester starting in 2011.

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.