Dagoberto Gilb

“Surviving the American Dream: A Conversation on Latino Literature” 
Featuring Dagoberto Gilb, Before the End, After the Beginning
Hosted by Achy Obejas

16^th Annual Story Week Festival of Writers: Surviving the American Dream
March 18 – 23, 2012

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of The Flowers, Gritos, Woodcuts of Women, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and The Magic Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines, most recently Harper’s, the New Yorker, and Callaloo, and are reprinted widely. Gilb is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the executive director of CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American literature and culture at the University of Houston, Victoria, where he is also writer in residence.

His most recent book, Before the End, After the Beginning, is an exquisite collection of ten stories. The pieces come in the wake of a stroke Gilb suffered at his home in Austin, Texas, in 2009, and a majority of the stories were written over his many months of recovery. The result is a powerful and triumphant book that tackles common themes of existence and identity and describes the American experience in a raw, authentic vernacular unique to Gilb.