I'm thrilled to share with you this Q&A with award-winning filmmaker and author Frances Negrón-Muntaner, which, due to her incredibly busy schedule, has been a long-time coming. I am eternally grateful to you, Frances, for having scraped the few spare moments you had together in order to answer these questions!
From Negrón-Muntaner's website:
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. Born in Puerto Rico to a family of academics, Negrón-Muntaner’s work spans several fields, including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her education anticipates these various interests: She obtained a Bachelor’s in sociology at the University of Puerto Rico (1986), then a Masters in film and anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia (1991, 1994), and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2000). For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Negrón-Muntaner has received Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships. Major foundations and public television funding sources have also supported her work.
Since the late 1980s, Negrón-Muntaner’s work has been considered an important resource in addressing sexuality, colonialism, nationalism, and migration in Puerto Rican/Latino diasporic communities. In 1994, she released the award-winning film Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1995 Whitney Biennial, Audience Award at the 1995 San Juan CinemaFest and a Merit Selection at the 1995 Latin American Studies Association Film Festival), the first Puerto Rican film to examine issues of race, gender and homophobia in the context of migration. Three years later, Negrón-Muntaner co-edited the groundbreaking Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, a collection that questioned the accepted formula that nationalism was the cure of colonialism. During the same year, she wrote the first draft of what was to become “The Radical Statehood Manifesto,” a political intervention that sought to challenge conventional ideas of sovereignty in the Caribbean. In 2004, Negrón-Muntaner published Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award 2004), a collection of essays that included “Jennifer’s Butt,” a landmark text for the discussion of contemporary U.S. popular culture.
Negrón-Muntaner has also contributed to the founding of programs and institutions to disseminate the work of Latino filmmakers and intellectuals. She is the founder of Miami Light Project's Filmmakers Workshop, the organizer/fundraiser of several conferences on Puerto Rican/Latino affairs, and a founding board member and former chair of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.
By: nilki,
on 6/16/2010
Blog: musings (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: LATiSM, Kety Esquivel, Author Interviews, Advice for Writers, QA, Add a tag
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JacketFlap tags: LATiSM, Kety Esquivel, Author Interviews, Advice for Writers, QA, Add a tag
Kety Esquivel has over fifteen years of experience in the non‐profit, private and political sectors. Kety graduated from Cornell University where she served on the Board of Trustees. While at Cornell, she organized students to defend issues as varied as financial aid and need-blind admissions to the environment. Her work has taken her to China and Ethiopia with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, she has worked as the New Media Manager for the National Council of Lar Raza (NCLR), and she is a published author and founder of CrossLeft.org. Her commentary has been featured and quoted in stories for the Wall St. Journal Online, HITN, PBS, XM radio, Democracy Now, CNN, Televisa and Univision. She blogs at her personal blog and at Huffington Post. She is the Executive Director and CEO of Latinos in Social Media (LATISM).
It's an honor for me to have had the opportunity to interview Kety. She is a source of great inspiration and is one of the most supportive people I have come across in social media. (Follow her on twitter).
This interview has been underway for a while, and I truly feel fortunate that Kety was able to squeeze a little bit of time for this interview between attending the People's World Conference for Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, organizing the first ever Latinos in Technology and Media MeetUp at SXSW, and getting married, oye!
Enjoy!
*********
You have so many incredible projects going on--how do you keep yourself on track, organized and coherent so that your energy is well-directed and productive?
1 Comments on A Q&A with Executive Director and CEO of LATiSM: Kety Esquivel, last added: 6/17/2010
By: nilki,
on 5/12/2010
Blog: musings (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Johnny Diaz, QA, Advice from Authors, Add a tag
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Author, Boston Globe media writer, and Emerson College journalism professor, Johnny Diaz has carved out a niche in fiction based on his personal experiences as a professional, thirty-something, Cuban-American, gay man living in Boston ("one of the few but proud"). His books include Boston Boys Club, Miami Manhunt and BeanTown Cubans.
Just recently, Johnny Diaz was awarded an Outstanding Alumni award for the Literary Arts from Miami Dade College.
Somewhere within the whirlwind of receiving awards, publishing, reporting and teaching, Johnny Diaz recently found some time to answer a Q&A for Musings' readers.
Congratulations on all your success, Johnny, and welcome to Musings!
*****
Can you tell us a little bit about your writing routine?
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By: nilki,
on 5/7/2010
Blog: musings (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Rafael Yglesias, QA, Advice from Authors, Add a tag
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Rafael Yglesias is a novelist and screenwriter. The son of novelists Jose Yglesias and Helen Yglesias, Rafael Yglesias has been writing since he dropped out of high school to finish his first novel Hide Fox, And All After (1972). By the age of 21, Yglesias had published 3 novels. Between 1976 and 1984, Yglesias stopped writing novels to focus on starting a family, writing screenplays instead for financial support.
He resumed writing novels in the mid '80s and published Hot Properties, Only Children, The Murderer Next Door, Fearless and Dr. Neruda's Cure For Evil.
He returned to screenwriting in 1992. His first screenplay to be produced was Fearless, an adaptation of his novel by the same name, starring Jeff Bridges. His scripts have been produced into motion pictures directed by Peter Weir, Roman Polanski, Billie August, the Hughes Brothers, and Walter Salles.
Shattered by the death of his father and the illness and death of his beloved wife, Yglesias again quit writing novels in 1996. His most recent novel (the first in thirteen years) A Happy Marriage (Scribner, 2009) took the top Fiction honor at this year's 30th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
Read the wonderful praise for this novel here.
I'm deeply honored that Mr. Rafael Yglesias was so incredibly generous with his time to answer a few questions about his writing process for Musings.
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What is your major obstacle, or most difficult issue regarding writing?
These days it's feeling confident. And concentrating. I make a lot of mistakes, and have a tendency to rush, to want to be finished, a kind of anxiousness that I don't think serves me well. When I was a young writer I had all those problems and also I needed to avoid being evicted. The money pressure wasn't helpful.
How do you attempt to overcome this?
I don't know what to do about the confidence. I try to ignore the fluctuations in mood that I experience about my work, to regard it as noise. I've been writing for forty years; it's too late to change professions. I try to limit how much I write to a couple of pages a day so I don't go too fast. And I try to force myself to read and rework passages that I've had trouble focusing on.
Literary fiction and screenwriting are two very different mediums. <
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We're very proud of Kety's work and with no doubt she'll lead LATISM to the next level. Thank you for this post and such an excellent interview.