Banquet and Keynote Address
At Hotel Caribe, Salon Arcos
Friday, March 11th
7:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Keynote Address:
Labor Strikes, Magic, & War; Romantic Love, Sex, & Humor; and Some Other Things Novelist García Márquez Brought to His Readers
Gene H. Bell-Villada
Gene H. Bell-Villada, born in Haiti, was raised by U.S. parents in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Venezuela. A professor of Romance Languages at Williams College, he is the author or editor of ten books. Among them is Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work (second ed., revised and expanded, 2010), winner of the 1991 New England Conference on Latin American Studies Best Book Prize, and recently translated to Spanish and Turkish.
His history of the problem of Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was translated to Serbian and Chinese. Bell-Villada has also published two books of fiction plus a memoir, Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics (2005). His latest volume bears the humorous long title, On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind: What the Russian-American Odd Couple Can Tell Us About Some Values, Myths and Manias Widely Held Most Dear (2013).
Finally, in 2004, Bell-Villada served as a consultant for the Oprah Winfrey show when One Hundred Years of Solitude was a selection for Oprah’s Book Club (he appeared on the program for approximately 45 seconds)!