Susana Chávez-Silverman, born in Los Angeles, California, is a U.S. Latina writer and professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Susana received her undergraduate degree in Spanish from University of California, Irvine in 1977 where she graduated magna cum laude. She continued her education at Harvard University where, in 1979, she received her Masters degree in Romance Languages. In 1991, Susana received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation was titled: The Ex-Centric Self: The Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik. Susana has taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, University of California, Davis, and the University of South Africa before coming to Pomona College.
Chávez-Silverman, born to a Jewish Hispanist father and a Chicana teacher mother, was raised in a bilingual and bicultural atmosphere between Los Angeles, Madrid and Guadalajara, Mexico. After completing her education, traveling a great deal, and living in Boston, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Spain and South Africa, she now resides in Claremont, California, where she is professor of Spanish, Latino/a and Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College. Susana specializes in gender and sexuality studies, autobiography/memoir, Latin American and U.S. Latina/Chicana literature, poetry, and feminist pedagogy. Chávez-Silverman has written and coauthored several books on the above-mentioned topics.
The bilingual creative nonfiction work by Chávez-Silverman is published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her book, Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. This collection of chronicles began in 2001, after the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Susana a fellowship for a project on contemporary Argentine women's poetry. She spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires where, in addition to research and writing on her official (academic) book, she began to send bilingual, punning "letters from the southern [cone] front" to colleagues and friends by email. Susana says: "Living in Buenos Aires, that gorgeous, turn of the century city in a country on the brink of (economic) collapse-home to many of the authors and artists I had long admired (Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, and before them the foundational Romantics, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Echeverría)-brought out a sense of self, displaced yet oddly at home, in a cultural, linguistic and even tangible way. In Buenos Aires, the fragmented parts of me, the voices, cultures, and places inside of me rubbed up against each other and struck fire. I called my email missives "Crónicas," inspired by the somewhat rough-hewn, journalistic, often fantastic first-hand accounts sent "home" by the early conquistadores, and refashioned by modern-day counterparts such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Cristina Pacheco." One of Susana's crónicas, "Anniversary Crónica," inspired by the June 16th anniversary of both Susana's parents' wedding and that of the so-called "Soweto Riots" in South Africa, was recently awarded First prize in Personal Memoir in the 2002 "Chicano Literary Excellence Contest" sponsored by the U.S. national literary magazine el Andar.
Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories is written in an unorthodox style in that it code-switches seamlessly between English and Spanish, without translation of either language. For instance, Killer Cronicas is "teeming with such bits of clever bilingual wordplay, such as 'feliz' (happy) to refer to homosexuals, and 'anyguey' for 'anyway.' Mixed in are countless Latin American regionalisms, joking phonetic spellings and faux translations, such as 'ternura' for 'tenure.' 'I know, ya se, mama,' she writes."
