Más allá: Julia Alvarez, Alma Cuervo, Mercedes Guhl, y Roseann Lake

Join us for an event to celebrate author Julia Alvarez’s Spanish-translation and audiobook of Afterlife/Más allá with Julia Alvarez, Alma Cuervo, Mercedes Guhl, y Roseann Lake.

Julia Alvarez has written novels, collections of poems, nonfiction, and numerous books for young readers. Best known for the novels In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, she has most recently published a new picture book for young readers, Already a Butterfly: A Meditation Story, in addition to Afterlife/Más allá. The recipient of a National Medal of Arts, Alvarez is a founder of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Alma Cuervo is a New York-based actor and narrator of recorded books. She has performed extensively on and off- Broadway (On Your Feet, Titanic, Cabaret, etc.) and around the country. She is honored to have narrated Afterlife/Más allá in both Spanish and English (Cuervo is on the white brick wall)

Mercedes Guhl translated Julia Alvarez “How the García Girls lost their Accent” into Spanish. Some years later, in 2010, she translated 3 of the four books of the Tía Lola series, for middle-grade readers, also by Julia Alvarez. After those came a non-fiction work, A Wedding in Haiti. And last year it was Afterlife. Along those six books, Mercedes has translated over 90 books since 1990, ranging from the depths of academic essay to graphic novel and children’s and YA fiction, that have allowed her to explore the wide range of translation challenges posed by books in general.

Roseann Lake is Spanish Content Publisher of RBmedia and its new venture BookaVivo. She brings more than a decade of experience as a journalist, first as a reporter in Beijing and then as Cuba correspondent for The Economist. She speaks five languages, including Spanish and Mandarin, and is the author of Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower (Norton, 2018).