TWFest Partners With NOMA For Arts & Letters Series

The Arts & Letters series at the New Orleans Museum of Art welcomes authors, poets, journalists, playwrights, and literary scholars to the museum for public conversations that reflect on literature at the intersection of arts and culture.

Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera will be the featured speaker on Friday, May 25, at 7 pm.

Admission is free to NOMA members; standard admission rates apply to all others. The museum is open till 9 pm on Fridays.

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Herrera studied politics in Mexico, creative writing in El Paso, and earned his PhD in literature at UC-Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian's Best Fiction and NBC News's Ten Great Latino Books, going on to win the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Herrera is currently teaching at Tulane University.

The book follows a young Mexican woman's journey across the Rio Grande, both physically and psychologically. In a review for The Guardian, Maya Jaggi writes, "Herrera's greatest achievement lies in elevating the harsh epic of crossing to the 'other side' to soaring myth. There are allusions to Odysseus, Orpheus and the Styx, the river of Greek mythology that was a border to the Underworld; as well as Mesoamerican stories of shapeshifting and rebirth."

Herrera will be interviewed on stage by Rosana Cruz, Vice President of Movement and Capacity Building at Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation.

Arts & Letters is funded by the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation with additional support from the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.

Visit noma.org for more information.