Susana Chavez-Silverman

Chávez-Silverman, born to a Jewish Hispanist father, Joseph H. Silverman, and language teacher June Chávez, 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 resides in Claremont, California, where she is professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Pomona College.[1] Her areas of expertise include creative nonfiction, Latin American and U.S. Latinx/Chicanx literature and culture, poetry, and queer sexualities in Latin American and Latinx literature and culture.

Chávez-Silverman received her undergraduate degree in Spanish from University of California, Irvine in 1977, graduating magna cum laude. She continued her education at Harvard University where, in 1979, she received her master's degree in Romance Languages. In 1991, Chávez-Silverman received her PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation was titled The Ex-Centric Self: The Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik.[2] Chávez-Silverman previously 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.[2]

Chávez-Silverman writes in a style in that code-switches seamlessly between English and Spanish, without translation of either language. The style includes, for instance, “clever bilingual wordplay, such as ‘feliz’ (happy) to refer to homosexuals, and ‘anygüey’ for ‘anyway.’ Mixed in are countless Latin-American regionalisms, joking phonetic spellings and faux translations, such as ‘ternura’ for ‘tenure.’[3]

Chávez-Silverman's first bilingual creative nonfiction work, Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004.[4] This collection of chronicles began in 2001, after the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Chávez-Silverman a fellowship for a project on contemporary Argentine women's poetry. She spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires where, in addition to researching for and writing her official (academic) book, she began to send bilingual, punning "letters from the southern [cone] front" to colleagues and friends by email. For an interview with the Pomona College Magazine, Chávez-Silverman said, "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."[5] One of Chávez-Silverman's crónicas, "Anniversary Crónica," inspired by the June 16 anniversary of both her parents' wedding and that of the so-called "Soweto Riots" in South Africa, was awarded First prize in Personal Memoir in the 2002 "Chicano Literary Excellence Contest" sponsored by the literary magazine El Andar.

In 2010, Chávez-Silverman published her second collection of "crónicas." Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters "follow[s] Chávez-Silverman’s personal history, from California to South Africa and Australia and back, from unfathomable loss to deeply felt joy."[6]

Chávez-Silverman's most recent publication, Heartthrob: Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back, 2019, "weaves together English and Spanish to lay bare the raw intensity and true fragility of love."[7] Written in Chávez-Silverman's familiar multilingual style, Heartthrob otherwise represents a departure from her previous work. With a strong, almost novelistic narrative arc, the book is a "love story for the ages," "based on detailed diary entries and confessional letters to family and friends," and deals with themes of belonging, migration, and South Africa under apartheid.[8]

• Audio recordings from “Killer Crónicas” and “Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters,” read by the author (June 2010)

• La Bloga: Interview with Susana Chavez-Silverman
• PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Vol 3, No 2 (2006): Oda a la ambigüedad Crónica
• Psychology Today: Life as a Bilingual
• Pomona College
• Mention of KC and links to KC audiofiles in Francois Grosjean’s BLOG (13-I-11)
• Interview with Daniel Olivas on "La Bloga", April 19, 2010