A professor of Spanish at Williams College since 1975, Dr. Bell-Villada is an expert in South American literature who has written extensively on genres, authors and works. His books on Gabriel García Márquez (García Márquez: The Man and His Work) and Jorge Luis Borges (Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art) are core texts that have helped lead thousands of readers nationwide through the intricacies of those authors' writings. In addition, he is the editor of the highly respected Casebook on One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brings together articles by several distinguished scholars of the novel and its author. Born in Haiti and raised in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Venezuela, Bell-Villada studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. His wide-ranging work Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two books of fiction, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror and The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella and 13 Stories.
A professor at Texas Tech University, Dr. Oberhelman has focused much of his scholarship about García Márquez on his fascination with American literary master William Faulkner and the similarities in the two men's work. Along those lines, he has written The Presence of Faulkner in the Writings of García Márquez and "William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez: Two Nobel Laureates." He has had the pleasure not only of meeting in person with García Márquez in a special symposium for scholars in 1996, but also visiting the author's native Colombia.
A rare thing in the book industry, Edith Grossman is such an accomplished translator that her name has become synonymous with quality Spanish translation in recent years. Her translations of Living to Tell the Tale, the autobiography by García Márquez, and Don Quixote, Cervantes' enduring classic, have both landed on bestseller lists and been heralded as the cream of the crop. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Berkeley and New York University where she holds a doctorate in Latin American literature, Grossman spent time in Spain in 1963 on a Fulbright scholarship and has been translating Latin America's most respected writers ever since. She has been working with García Márquez for more than 15 years, first translating Love in the Time of Cholera when the author decided he needed a new translator in 1988. She lives in New York City.
The Luella LaMer Slaner Chair of Latin American Studies and Chair of the Spanish Department for Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Dr. Lorraine Roses has written extensively about the role of women in One Hundred Years of Solitude, most especially an article titled "The Sacred Harlots of One Hundred Years of Solitude" in the casebook on the novel edited by Gene Bell-Villada. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University.

Devoting herself to contemporary Latin American writing, Dr. Roses has put a great deal of her emphasis on Mexico and the Caribbean and teaches courses that examine the role of family, gender, memory and political turmoil on the imagination of Latin American literature. Some of her research includes the history of black women writers during the Harlem Renaissance, the literary world of Gabriel García Márquez and the evolution of magical realism as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Editor and writer Tamara Kaye Sellman originally founded MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism (www.magical-realism.com) in 1998 as a blog. However, MARGIN was launched formally in January 2000 as a free web anthology when Selman discovered a lack of quality exposures to magical realism beyond the academic sector. Her purpose in publishing MARGIN is to accessibly promote an understanding of magical realism to all readers regardless of education, and to help promote the works of contemporary magical realists who often struggle to publish because of the indefinable nature of their work. MARGIN now boasts a burgeoning readership from more than 70 countries and is one of the leading clearinghouses for information on literary magical realism.
Susan Deefholts is a writer and independent scholar who has long been fascinated with magical realism. Though she grew up in Canada, her mixed European and Indian background gave her an early taste of the alternate worlds of magical realism through the family stories and legends she heard as a child. She is the Managing Editor of MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, a web anthology (www.magical-realism.com), where she loves exploring the marvelously diverse ways in which magical realism finds its way into stories, films and popular culture.
Lois Parkinson Zamora teaches at the University of Houston in the departments of English, History, and Art. She, with co-author Wendy B. Faris, is one of the world's pre-eminent scholars on the impact of magical realism on literature. Zamora's main area of specialization is contemporary fiction in the Americas and her many publications include Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S and Latin American Fiction,Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America l866-1994 and The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas, and she co-edited with Wendy B. Faris Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Zamora served as Dean of the College of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Communication at the University of Houston, 1996-99.
Dr. Faris is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the author of Carlos Fuentes and Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction, as well as co-editor, with Dr. Lois Parkinson Zamora, of Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community. She has recently completed a seminal work on literary magical realism titled Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative.
Published 01/20/2004

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