Leading with literacy

Alejandro Zambra, the author of “Ways of Going Home,” will be the keynote featured author for the Big Read Keynote Panel at noon Thursday in Shary Room 1.206 in the University Library on the Edinburg campus.

The event is sponsored by Big Read, a program promoting literacy that is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Big Read is part of the Festival of International Books & Arts which started last Friday.

Steven Schneider is a creative writing professor who will moderate Zambra’s panel.

“It’s free. It’s open to the public,” Schneider said. “There will be a question-and-answer session that I will conduct with him, about him and his work.”

Zambra’s novel “Ways of Going Home” is a story told in two parts.

“You have the [main] story about a fictional young boy growing up in Chile under [a dictator],” Schneider said.

The professor said Zambra tells a story within in a story by having the book switch between fiction and fact. The author wrote about what writing the story was like in alternating chapters.

Zambra wrote “My Documents,” a short story, and two other novels, “The Private Lives of Trees” and “Bonsai.” His works have also been published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Tin House, the Paris Review and Harper’s. He was named one of the Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010 by Granta, a literary quarterly in the United Kingdom. He is also a Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library.

Schneider said this is a rare opportunity for students to meet an internationally acclaimed author from Latin America. He said students who are interested in literature and creative writing will be inspired by someone who is considered one of the top young Latino writers in the world.

“Our special events this year, we’re showing two films. Because [the novel] is about Chile, the films are related to Chile,” he said. “We’re showing ‘The Battle of Chile’ and … ‘Neruda,’ which is about the poet, Pablo Neruda.”

The films will be shown at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Dustin Michael Sekula Memorial Library in Edinburg.

For more information, contact Schneider at steven.schneider@utrgv.edu. Individuals interested in FESTIBA

events can visit www.utrgv.edu/festiba/.