The Writer’s Center welcomes acclaimed author Bárbara Mujica for a presentation of her new novel, Miss del Río, in conversation with novelist Domnica Radulescu. Book signing to follow.
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Bárbara Mujica is a professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University and a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her latest novel, Miss del Río, is based on the life of Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Frida, based on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, was an international bestseller and appeared in eighteen languages. I Am Venus explores the identity of the model for Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, the painter’s only extant female nude. Sister Teresa, which was adapted for the stage at The Actors Studio in Los Angeles, offers an intimate portrait of Teresa de Ávila, a sixteenth-century nun of Jewish origin who became one of Catholicism’s most beloved saints.
Mujica has won numerous prizes for her stories, including the E.L. Doctorow International Fiction Award, the Pangolin Prize, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for Short Fiction, and first prize in the 2015 Maryland Writers’ Association national fiction competition. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and hundreds of other publications.
Since her son, a U.S. Marine, returned from Iraq in 2008, Mujica has devoted much of her energy to serving veterans. In 2015, she received a Presidential Medal from Georgetown University for her work in this area. Her collection of stories, Imagining Iraq, an Amazon bestseller in 2022, features stories based on incidents veterans described to her. Collateral Damage: Women Write about War is an edited collection of women’s war-writing.
Mujica’s latest scholarly books are Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform; A New Anthology of Early Modern Spanish Theater: Play and Playtext; Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia; Teresa de Ávila, Lettered Woman; and Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia’s Daughters.
Domnica Radulescu is the Edwin A. Morris Professor of Comparative Literature at Washington and Lee University. She is the author of three nationally and internationally acclaimed novels: Country of Red Azaleas (Twelve Hackett Book Group 2016), Black Sea Twilight (Doubleday 2010 & 2011) and Train to Trieste (Knopf 2008 & 2009). Train to Trieste has been published in twelve languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Her play The Town with Very Nice People: A Strident Operetta has been chosen as a runner up for the 2013 Jane Chambers Playwriting award given by the Association for Theater in Higher Education. Her play Naturalized Woman was produced at the Thespis Theater Festival in New York City in 2012. She has authored, edited and co-edited several scholarly books on theater, exile and representations of women and received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. She is also a Fulbright scholar and is presently working on her fourth novel titled My Father’s Orchards and on two new plays, titled House in a Boat and Crack in the Wall.
About Miss del Río
1910, Mexico. As the country’s revolution spreads, Dolores, the daughter of a wealthy banker, must flee her comfortable life in Durango or risk death. Her family settles in Mexico City, where, at sixteen, she marries the worldly Jaime del Río. But in a twist of fate, at a party she meets an influential American director who recognizes in her a natural performer. He invites her to Hollywood, and practically overnight, the famous Miss del Río is born.
In California, Dolores’s star quickly rises, and her days become a whirlwind of moviemaking and glamorous events. Swept up in Tinseltown’s glitzy inner circle, she takes her place among film royalty such as Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles. But as her career soars to new heights, her personal life becomes increasingly complicated, with family tragedy, painful divorce, and real heartache. And when she’s labeled box office poison amid growing prejudice against foreigners before World War II, Dolores must decide what price she’s willing to pay to achieve her dreams and if her heart and future instead lie where it all began…in Mexico.
Spanning half a century and narrated by Dolores’s fictional hairdresser and longtime friend Mara, Miss del Río traces the life of a trailblazing woman whose legacy in Hollywood and in Mexico still shines bright today.
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