Margarita Saona

Margarita Saona teaches Latin American literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in Peru and studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published books on literary and cultural criticism such as Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), and Despadre: Masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana. Her short fiction collections are Comehoras (Lima, 2008), Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2020). She also has a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017) and an unpublished collection of poems entitled Precaria materia. She is currently working two books, a short essay entittled De monstruos y cyborgs and Corazón en trance, a memoir about her experience of heart transplantation.

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