Recommended by the New York Times and NBC News, and called one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed!
Octavio Solis will be in conversation with Erik Ehn.
The New York Times directs readers to Retablos if you want to know "what's life really like on the Mexican border." "Solis grew up just a mile from the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, and he tells stories about his childhood and coming of age, including his parents migration to the United States from Mexico, his first encounter with racism and finding a Mexican migrant girl hiding in the cotton fields."--Concepción de León, New York Times
Seminal moments, rites of passage, crystalline vignettes--a memoir about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border.
Author of over 20 plays, Octavio Solis is considered one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. With works that both draw on and transcend the Mexican-American experience, he examines the darkness, magic and humor of humanity with brutal honesty and intensity, crossing cultural and aesthetic boundaries. His works, which include Alicia's Miracle, Se Llama Cristina, John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, Ghosts of the River, Quixote, Lydia, June in a Box, Lethe, Marfa Lights, Gibraltar, The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, The 7 Visions of Encarnación, Bethlehem, Dreamlandia, El Otro, Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, and La Posada Mágica have been mounted at the California Shakespeare Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and other venues nationwide. Among his many awards and grants, Solis has received an NEA Playwriting Fellowship, the Kennedy Center's Roger L. Stevens award, the TCG/NEA Theatre Artists in Residence Grant, the National Latino Playwriting Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Drama.
His fiction has been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Eleven Eleven, the Louisville Review, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Arroyo Literary Review and Zyzzyva.
Erik Ehn is an American playwright and director known for proposing the Regional Alternative Theatre movement. The former dean of theater at CalArts, the California Institute of Arts, he is the former head of playwriting and professor of theatre and performance studies at Brown University. His published works include The Saint Plays, Beginner, and 13 Christs.
