Event



A READING BY DANIEL SALDAÑA PARÍS

Creative Writing Program
Oct 3, 2017 at - | The Kelly Writers House

Daniel

Widely described as one of the rising new voices of Mexican literature, DANIEL SALDAÑA PARÍS is an essayist, poet and novelist. His first novel, Among Strange Victims (Coffee House Press), was translated into English by Christina MacSweeney and published to critical acclaim in 2016.

He studied philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid between 2002 and 2006 and, during this time, was an editorial assistant for the Spanish edition of the cultural magazine, Letras Libres. In 2006 he gained a Young Creators grant from FONCA (Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts) and from 2007 to 2009 received a further award from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas (Mexican Literature Foundation). He was recently awarded once more with the FONCA grant for the 2016/2017 period.

Saldaña París has published two collections of poetry: Esa pura materia (That Pure Matter, awarded the “Jaime Reyes” Prize for Young Poets in 2007) and La máquina autobiográfica (The Autobiographical Machine). He edited and wrote the prologues for Doce en punto: Poesía chilena reciente(Twelve Sharp: Recent Chilean Poetry) and Un nuevo modo: Antología de narrativa mexicana actual (A New Way: Anthology of present-day Mexican Fiction), both published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2012. That same year, he was a writer in residence at the Union des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois with an award given by the Conseil des Artes et des Lettres du Québec, in Montreal. He has been anthologized, most recently in Mexico20: New Voices, Old Traditions, published in the UK by Pushkin Press.

He is also the creator of Método Universal de Poesia Derivada (Universal method of Derived Poetry), which features urban tours taking a poetic text as the point of departure; this project was included as a transmedia work in the Sexto Foro de Arte Público Siqueiros (Sixth Public Art Forum “Siqueiros”) in Mexico City in 2009. His piece ‘No quiero saber nada de mí mismo' (‘I Don't Want To Know Anything About Myself') was included in a group exhibition held at Hose of Gaga Gallery in Mexico City in 2014. He made his debut as an actor in Miguel Calderon's Zeus, which premiered at the Morelia Film Festival in 2016.

He has been a writer in residence at the Omi International Arts Center in 2014 and 2015, and at The MacDowell Colony in 2016. His work has appeared in BOMB!, Publisher's Weekly, Guernica, The Guardian, LitHub.com, Electric Literature, Music & Literature, The Quarterly Conversation, El País, and on KCRW's UnFictional, among others. Some of his poetry has been translated into English, French and Swedish for international magazines.

Saldaña París has worked for more than ten years as a freelance editor and translator for art institutions such as the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Fundación Alumnos 47, and Casa Vecina, and for publishing houses such as Random House Mexico and Fondo de Cultura Económica. Between 2014 and 2015, he was editor in chief for the poetry series Práctica Mortal, published by the Mexican Secretariat of Culture. He has also written for publications by Mexican artists such as Miguel Calderón, Iñaki Bonillas, Mariana Castillo Deball, Tatiana Bilbao, and Francisco Mata Rosas, among others.

He currently writes a monthly column for the Latin American edition of Esquire magazine and lives in Montreal, Canada.