WLT to Co-Sponsor Talk by Distinguished Mexican Jewish Writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman and D. P. Snyder

A special zoom event featuring Angelina Muñiz-Huberman and her translator, D. P. Snyder, will take place at noon CDT on Wednesday, March 26. Co-sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies and WLT, the event will feature Snyder interviewing this grande dame of Mexican letters about language (human and nonhuman), the human intolerance of ambiguity, the mystical letter, and their writer-translator relationship. The webinar is free and open to the public (no advance registration is required).

As a jumping-off point, Snyder will introduce her translation of Muñiz-Huberman’s story about a sixteenth-century hermaphrodite, “Right and Left; or, Of Mystics and Politicians,” that appears in the March 2025 issue of WLT. “Right and Left” is a chapter from Muñiz-Huberman’s novel La burladora de Toledo (2008, The trickster of Toledo; see WLT, Sept. 2009), the story of the sexually, religiously, and culturally ambiguous Elena-Eleno de Céspedes, history’s first known female surgeon.

Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (b. 1936, Hyères, France), a naturalized Mexican citizen since 1954, is the author of over fifty books, a retired professor in the School of Philosophy and Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and, since January 2021, holds the seventh chair of the Mexican Academy of Letters. She is known for her work as a medievalist and her writing about the exile experience, Sephardic mysticism, crypto-Judaism, the Kabbalistic tradition in Jewish Iberia, and her playful and precise writing style. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for the Novel (1993), the Xavier Villarrutia (1985), the José Fuentes Mares (1997), the National Prize for Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Woman of Valor Award. She received a doctorate honoris causa from the National Mexican University in 2022. In addition to her prolific narrative output, Muñiz-Huberman is an accomplished poet whose verse touches on themes of identity, exile, gender, and death, which serve as a starting point for exploring human nature and the experience of life.

D. P. Snyder is a bilingual writer, poet, and translator between English and Spanish. Her work has appeared in the Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Two Lines Journal, Georgia Review, World Literature Today, and Latin American Literature Today, among others. Her book-length works include 33 Dreams, poetry by Juan Carlos Garbayo (2020); Meaty Pleasures, by Mónica Lavín (2021); Arrhythmias, by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (2022; see WLT, May 2023); and Scary Story, by Alberto Chimal (2023; see WLT, May 2024). Her translations have been anthologized, notably in Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa (2020), Daughters of Latin America (2023), and Constellation (2024). She is an editorial board member at Reading in Translation and a recent co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee.

The largest center of its kind in the Southern Plains region, the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies is part of the Dodge Family College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

Click here to join the webinar.