Background
Cynthia Steele was born on August 7, 1951, in Colusa, California, United States. She is the daughter of Ned and Lorraine (Heard) Steele.
(The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on Octo...)
The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the next two decades responded to the massacre and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EENPGMQ/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(Inés Arredondo (1928–1989) published just three slim volu...)
Inés Arredondo (1928–1989) published just three slim volumes of stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, “a necessary writer,” is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo’s adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in “The Nocturnal Butterflies” and “Shadows in the Shadows” and the dying uncle in “The Shunammite,” who is kept alive by incestuous lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices–along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church–in the sordid age-old traffic in women. Underground River and Other Stories is the first appearance of Arredondo’s stories in English. Inés Arredondo (1928–1989) published just three slim volumes of stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, “a necessary writer,” is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo’s adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in “The Nocturnal Butterflies” and “Shadows in the Shadows” and the dying uncle in “The Shunammite,” who is kept alive by incestuous lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices–along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church–in the sordid age-old traffic in women. Underground River and Other Stories is the first appearance of Arredondo’s stories in English.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803259271/?tag=2022091-20
1996
educator literary critic translator writer
Cynthia Steele was born on August 7, 1951, in Colusa, California, United States. She is the daughter of Ned and Lorraine (Heard) Steele.
Steele became a Bachelor in English and Spanish after graduating from California State University at Chico in 1973. She then received a Master of Arts degree in Spanish Literature from University of California at San Diego in 1979 and obtained her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Spanish Literature from it in 1980.
Steele started her career working as an assistant professor of Spanish at Ohio State University in 1980. Five years later, she went to Columbia, where she held the same position at Columbia University till 1986. Since then, Steele works as a freelance writer and serves as a professor of comparative literature, cinema and media at the University of Washington.
In addition to the books Narrativa indigenista en los Estados Unidos y México (Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1985) and Politics, Gender and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988 (University of Texas, 1992), Steele is known as the author of twenty-eight journal articles on contemporary Latin American narrative and film. Also, she has published numerous translations of poetry and prose, including Inés Arredondo, Underground Rivers and Other Stories (University of Nebraska, 1996) and José Emilio Pacheco, City of Memory (Poems 1986-89) (City Lights, 1997, with David Lauer).
Most recently Steele has published translations of two short stories by Mexican author Sergio Pitol in the Chicago Review and Gulf Coast. She has translated an anthology of poetry by Zapotec-language writers from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec which is being considered for publication by a major university press.
(Inés Arredondo (1928–1989) published just three slim volu...)
1996(The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on Octo...)
1992Steele is a member of the Modern Language Association of America, Latin American Studies Association and Instituto de Literatura Iberoamericana.
Steele is single and has no children.
