Collaborator Bios

Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans is a Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and a Five-College 40th Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Riddle of Cantinflas (1997), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), Dictionary Days (2005), and The Disappearance (2006). Stavans's short stories are included in The One-Handed Pianist (1996) and The Disappearance (2006), from which his short story Morirse está en hebreo was turned into a movie directed by Alejandro Springall, My Mexican Shivah. Stavans is the editor of, among other work, The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1998), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), the 4-volume Encyclopedia Latina (2005), and Lengua Fresca (2006). He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Hall of Fame Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, the Ruben Dario Medal, and the National Jewish Book Award. Routeledge published The Essential Ilan Stavans in 2000, University of Wisconsin brought out Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations, by Neal Sokol, in 2004, and Yale University released On Love in 2007. His oeuvre has been translated into a dozen languages.

Hayley Wood

Hayley Wood has been making puppets, paintings, and drawings for many years. She worked for a year as an apprentice to a master upholsterer, and this experience with fine fabrics, hair, burlap and springs led to her interest in making smaller objects with similar materials. She attended Marlboro College and studied oil painting and literature, receiving a BA in English literature. After a couple glorious waitressing years, she earned her MA in literature at the University of New Hampshire, completing a should-have-been published thesis about gender and humor in the novels of Anthony Trollope. She is a program officer for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, having worked there for over nine years. She lives in Northampton with her husband Mark Roessler and their son Otis.