Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 to an Eastern European Jewish family. In 1985, after a sojourn in Spain, he moved to the United States and began writing while taking a doctorate from Columbia University. The past decade has established him as a distinguished Latino critic, editor and author. Currently he is a professor of Latin American and Latino Cultures at Amherst College. His published work, translated into several languages, includes The Hispanic Condition; On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language; The Essential Ilan Stavans; and The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. Stavans has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and the recipient of the Latino Literature Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

2003 saw the publication of the controversial Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, a pan-Hispanic socio-linguistic reference work which includes a vibrant introductory essay examining the historical context of Spanglish, a lexicon of 4,500 words, and Stavans’ Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Don Quijote de La Mancha. (2009)

Ilan Stavans's page at Amherst College

Events

May 4, 2009