Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures

Lyn Di Iorio is Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. She is the author of the novel Outside the Bones (2011), which won ForeWord Review's 2011 Silver Book of the Year Award in the category of literary fiction, was Best Debut Novel on the 2011 Latinidad List, and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Prize, and other prizes. She also wrote Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity (2004) and coedited Contemporary U.S. Latino Literary Criticism (2007). Currently at work on a second novel called The Sound of Falling Darkness, she is number two on the 2012 Top Ten 'New' Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) list compiled by LatinoStories.com.

Richard Perez is Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College School of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, USA where he teaches courses on US Latino/a, Caribbean, and Postcolonial literatures. He is the director of a forthcoming minor in US Latino/a Literature, only the second in the nation. He is currently at work on a book entitled Towards a Negative Aesthetics: U.S. Latino/a Fiction and the Remaking of American Literature, which recently won an Andrew Mellon fellowship. He is the co-editor of the anthology Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Criticism and his work has appeared in Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, Latino Studies Journal, and MELUS.