november, 2025
Event Details
Join us for a conversation celebrating two remarkable new releases from Two Lines Press that illuminate the power and complexity of women’s voices in Mexican literature.
The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney, reimagines the life of the legendary writer Elena Garro. Blending biography, memoir, and literary investigation, Barrera crafts a vivid portrait of a woman whose brilliance and contradictions shaped Mexico’s literary history.
Alongside it, The Week of Colors introduces English-language readers to Garro herself through Megan McDowell’s masterful translation. These haunting, genre-defying stories reveal the roots of magical realism and feminist horror, exposing the violence embedded in everyday life with lyric intensity and imagination.
In this event, Barrera and McDowell will explore Garro’s influence, the act of literary resurrection through translation, and the porous border between fiction and reality. Moderated by Sean Cotter, acclaimed translator and scholar of Latin American literature, the discussion will trace a lineage of women who have transformed how we tell stories—and how we see the world.
Jazmina Barrera’s books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Her book Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize by Literal Publishing, and On Lighthouses was chosen for the Indie Next list by IndieBound. Linea Nigra was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize, CANIEM’s Book of the Year award, and the Amazon Primera Novela (First Novel) Award. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.
Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.
The translator of many works of Romanian literature, Sean Cotter is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.
