Talking with Yuri Herrera About Season of the Swamp, Palestine, ICE, and Fighting for a Better World

Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision.  We talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez.  Very importantly, we relate all of this to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism. We are especially grateful to Yuri for reading from his novel, and talking in depth about the importance of mixed languages and the new social worlds they reflect.

Bio

Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). His first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.