The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature novelist Cristina Henríquez on Thursday, April 6, at 7 p.m. in the John and Dede Howard Recital Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts.
There will also be a question-and-answer session in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Cristina Henríquez is the author of “Come Together, Fall Apart,” a collection of stories; “The World in Half,” a novel; and most recently “The Book of Unknown Americans,” a novel about a family’s hopes for their new life in America. “The Book of Unknown Americans” is one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2014 and made it onto many other Best of 2014 Book lists, including The Washington Post, NPR, among others.
In her lectures, Henríquez, who grew up half-American, half-Panamanian, speaks about identity and addresses common narratives about immigration. She also speaks to aspiring writers about the writer’s creative and technical process.
In writing “The Book of Unknown Americans,” Henríquez was inspired by her father’s Panamà-to-U.S. immigration story and other experiences of real people in Delaware, where she grew up. The novel, which has been called, “a flawlessly written book about immigration,” brings to life the varied human stories behind the ongoing debate about immigration through the eyes of characters from all over Latin America.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and she has been a guest on National Public Radio. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Northwestern University.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street. The Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts is located at 221 Columbia Ave., between 9th and 10th streets.