Downstate Legacies

Check out the latest book in our Undiscovered Americas translation and lost books series: Ships in Houston: Stories by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward.

All Undiscovered Americas book are open access and available as PDFs for no cost, but snazzy-looking print books are also available for purchase at our store bit.ly/DownstateLegacies or from Small Press Distribution. You can download the book here https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/ua/3/

About Ships in Houston
Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, s*x workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with Mexico might grab more headlines, these stories take place mostly in Mexico, where stringent immigration policies target Central American migrants, causing them to make fateful—and even fatal—decisions born from desperation, as these migrants live in fear of being deported from Mexico back to Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. Bringing Villafuerte’s work into English for the first time, Ward deftly unfurls the author’s edgy and fragmentary stream-of-consciousness narrative style, creating a translation that is at once as jarring as it is deeply humanizing, giving readers unfettered access to complex characters in just a few page turns. Moving through the extreme push and pull of liminal spaces in Chiapas, Nadia Villafuerte’s stories of everyday horror—and hope—in Ships in Houston will haunt you long after you close the book.

About the Author
Nadia Villafuerte was born in 1978 in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. She studied journalism and music, and has received fellowships from the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) and the Foundation for Mexican Letters (FLM), both in Mexico. Her publications include three collections of short stories: Preludio (Prelude), Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston), and ¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (Do you Like Latex, Honey?), and the novel Por el lado salvaje (On the Wild Side). Her work has also been anthologized in various collections. She has an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. Villafuerte lives in New York City, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University.

About the Translator
Julie Ann Ward was born in Oklahoma in 1983. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book A Shared Truth: The Theater of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol was published in 2019 with University of Pittsburgh Press, and her essays, fiction, and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Dancing with the Zapatistas, PostScript, InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, Theatre Journal, Trans/Modernity, Latin American Theatre Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, and Paso de Gato. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

Ships in Houston Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to languag...

Our latest Undiscovered Americas series release, Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, edited by Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean MacDonald, is now available. Find the open access book for free download as a PDF at the link below (you can also find a link to purchase an affordable print-on-demand copy). We hope this lost classic of nineteenth-century African American fiction finds its way to new readers, scholars, teachers, and students!

Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune “Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.” So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in...

Laura Cesarco Eglin, whose translation of Hilda Hilst's Of Death. Minimal Odes won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry, recommends Downstate Legacies's Härte by Sade LaNay as one of the three books of poetry at the top of her list right now. Read Cesarco Eglin's full interview with Laura Marris in The Millions.

Best Translated Book Awards Spotlight: The Millions Interviews Laura Cesarco Eglin - The Millions I’ve been living with these poems for a few years: reading, translating, editing. The editing is difficult because you know it’s the prelude to letting go.