Prose Cafe: Signe Hammer, Wayne Grady, Merilyn Simonds

Prose Café Bellas Artes
Signe Hammer, Wayne Grady, Merilyn Simonds

Thursday, Dec 5, 5:00 – 6:00 PM

Sala Literaria, 1st Floor
 El Centro Culturál Ignacio Ramírez “El Nigromante”
Hernández Macías 75

Suggested Donation $50 pesos

Writers of Fiction and Nonfiction at December Literary Event

By Maia Williams

Prose Café is a curated series of readings featuring three writers of fiction and nonfiction presenting fifteen minutes of their work in a casual setting. December’s program will feature three professional writers, two from Canada and one from the United States. All three are on the faculty of the 2020 San Miguel Writers’ Conference.

Signe Hammer’s memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was described as “fascinating and disturbing,” with “an ironic distance worthy of Jane Austen,” in the New York Times Book Review, which named it a Notable Book. Her other books include Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters; Passionate Attachments: Fathers and Daughters in America Today and Women: Body and Culture: Essays on the Sexuality of Women in a Changing Society. Her feature articles, reviews and personal essays have appeared in such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Travel/Holiday, Ms. and The Village Voice; her short stories and poems in Playgirl, Fiction, New England Review and others. As an Adjunct Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, she received an Award for Teaching Excellence. She has been an editor at both a major New York book publisher and a national magazine, and as a writing coach and editor helps writers develop their work. She has enjoyed spending time in San Miguel since the 1990s.

Wayne Grady is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, including The Quiet Limit of the World, Bringing Back the Dodo, and The Great Lakes: A Natural History, which won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award. More recently he has turned to writing fiction. His first novel, Emancipation Day, was a finalist for the Scotiabank-Giller Award, Canada’s top prize for fiction, and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. It is currently being made into an opera by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra. His most recent novel, Up From Freedom, which takes place in the United States in the middle of the 19th century, has been hailed as “an arresting novel that wisely and movingly brings to life a cast of characters struggling in the snares of slavery and racism.” Wayne spends half the year in San Miguel with his wife, Merilyn Simonds.

Merilyn Simonds is award-winning author of 18 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. In 2017, Project Bookmark Canada unveiled a plaque to honor the place of The Convict Lover in Canada’s literary landscape.

Merilyn’s short fiction is anthologized internationally and her books are published in the UK, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States. Her most recent novel is Refuge, set in Mexico City, New York, and eastern Ontario. Her current work-in-progress is Woman, Watching, a memoir/biography of a reclusive Canadian woman who was one of the most influential amateur ornithologists in North America.

Merilyn is a Past Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, founder of a major literary festival in Kingston, Ontario, and she is the Canadian consultant for our own San Miguel Writers Conference. Merilyn shares her life with writer Wayne Grady; they divide their time between Mexico and Canada.

Read the whole article by Maia Williams HERE.

Seating is limited; please arrive a few minutes early.