Carmen Boullosa is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...

, Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.-Life:...

 and Elena Poniatowska

Elena Poniatowska

Elena Poniatowska is a Mexican journalist and author. Her generation of writers include Carlos Fuentes‎, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis.-Life:Poniatowska was born in Paris to Prince Jean Joseph Evremont Sperry Poniatowski and Paula Amor Yturbe...

, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University

Georgetown University

Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...

, Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York

City College of New York

The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura

Alejandro Aura

Alejandro Aura was a Mexican writer, essayist, poet, playwright and actor, as well as a culture promoter and television host.-Biography:...

 --and is now married to Mike Wallace

Mike Wallace (historian)

Mike Wallace is an American historian, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1971, and the director of the Gotham Center for New York City History....

, the Pulitzer-prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 is a non-fiction book by historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Based on over twenty years of research by Burrows and Wallace, it was published in 1998 by Oxford University Press and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History...

.

Works

Boullosa has written over a dozen novels, and some of these works have been translated into five different languages. Her bestselling novel, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) was translated into English in 1997 as They're Cows, We're Pigs. The story is narrated in the first person by an old man looking back on his life. He was kidnapped and sent from his native France on a slave ship to the West Indies

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 at the age of thirteen. To gain his freedom, he joins a group of pirates (or "pigs"), allowing Boullosa to compare two very different societal and political systems—traditional Europe and carefree pirates. In La milagrosa, a novel written in 1993, the protagonist is a girl who has the power to heal the sick and perform other miracles while she sleeps. She falls in love with Aurelio Jimenez, a detective sent to discredit her, even though she fears that her powers will disappear if she spends time with people. It ends ambiguously, leaving an unsolved murder without closure. Duerme, another popular work published in 1995, tells the story of Claire, a French woman whose mother was a prostitute. Attempting to escape the same profession, she arrives in Spain dressed as a man. To save a subject of the Spanish king, she reveals herself as a female and prepares to take his punishment of death by hanging. Beforehand, however, she is wounded in the left breast and her blood is replaced by water from the lakes of Mexico City. The water's magical powers make it possible for her to survive the punishment.

She is also famous for her Teatro herético (1987), a compilation of three parodies in play format—Aura y las once mil vírgenes, Cocinar hombres, and Propusieron a María. The first tells the story of a man called by God to "deflower" eleven thousand virgins in his life, so that heaven's overpopulation problem might be addressed, since the women will have to wait in purgatory for a time. The man then uses his sexual encounters as material for his television commercials and becomes a successful advertising agent. Cocinar hombres tells the story of two girls who find themselves to have become young adult witches overnight, so as to fly over the earth tempting but not satisfying men. Finally, the third play satirically recounts the conversation between Joseph

Saint Joseph

Saint Joseph is a figure in the Gospels, the husband of the Virgin Mary and the earthly father of Jesus Christ ....

 and Mary before Mary gives birth to Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

and ascends to heaven.

External links

• Boullosa's homepage
• Interview in BOMB Magazine
• "Just Disappear" Center for the Art of Translation, translated by Christy Rodgers
• "Mass Menstruation and Lesbian Orgies: The Women’s Writing of Carmen Boullosa" The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 19