A Book Signing, Reading, and Reception will be held on Wednesday, April 12, from 4-6 p.m. in the Willis N. Hackney Library.
WILSON, N.C. — April 5, 2017 — Much like the camera lens captures a fleeting moment, Dr. Luis Carlos Ayarza’s writing provides the reader with a momentary glimpse into his soul as he contemplates his research interests through a collection of commentaries in his first book, “Enjambre de Zepelines.”
To meet the author and learn more about the book, please join the campus community for a Book Signing, Reading, and Reception to be held on Wednesday, April 12, from 4-6 p.m. in the Willis N. Hackney Library on the Barton campus.
The book, written in Spanish, will intrigue the reader with its series of notes that the author offers as writing exercises. “…writings, which are simultaneously readings,” shared Belen Gache, author of the Forward for the book. “These are lived-through writings, which have touched a human body with feeling and emotions, which awaken personal memories and images. Here we find 38 commentaries about books, films, sculptures, and ideas. They are woven, as the author comments, from the “point of view of the marginalized.” Like moths, the writings collectively join writers, film directors, critics, literary magazine editors, bibliophiles, and also fictitious characters. What do they all have in common? What does Sergio Leone have in common with Thomas Mann or Alvaro Mutis? Evidently very little. And yet…”
This book reflects Dr. Ayarza’s main areas of expertise in Latin American literature and cultures, as well as his research interests, which include creative writing, art, film, and visual culture. There also is a clear correlation between his book’s “point of view” and his doctoral dissertation, which analyzed a number of texts that are consistently excluded from the canonical lists because of their marginal position in relation to traditional literary genres in the Latin American canon.
Dr. Ayarza further explained, “Likes moths to the flame, certain texts, movies, images, or characters attract my attention. They momentarily succeed in opening the portal to fascination and discovery. This book contains writing exercises, erratic, orbital, moth-like, which are the result of that fascination. I would not know how to live without the presence of these and the writings that issue from them, which in a way prolongs them, recovers them, and illuminates the trail they have revealed.”
Book editor Pablo de Cuba Soria perfectly summarizes “Enjambre de Zepelines” as “a book that belongs to the world of yesterday, to that written universe—which, nevertheless, is real, too real; that remains the same on Proust’s Combray Road, as well in the crammed library of Gomez Davila, or Depardieu’s ‘Vatel,’ or in the nonexistent cashmere coat of Joseph Brodsky. Before us are the writings/fragments of a flaneur, whose writings witness what his vision—sometimes fascinatedly romantic, other times melancholically modern—invents/reveals between the lines or amidst objects, which his memory goes about transforming, bequeathing them literary autonomy.”
Ayarza’s “Enjambre de Zepelines” is available for purchase online at Amazon.com or through the publisher at Editorial Casa Vacía.com and casavacía16@gmail.com.
For additional information about the book signing and reception, please contact George Loveland, director of the Willis N. Hackney Library, at 252-399-6501 or gwloveland@barton.edu.
About the author —
An assistant professor of Spanish at Barton College and the faculty liaison to the Hispanic community, Dr. Ayarza was born in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2003, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications with a major in Audiovisual Production from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Continuing with graduate studies, Dr. Ayarza completed his Master of Fine Arts degree in Bilingual Creative Writing in 2008 at the University of Texas at El Paso, and later earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University in 2013.
Along with his research interests mentioned above, Dr. Ayarza has a strong commitment to enhance diversity and inclusion in the community. In Colombia, he worked with organizations promoting the reading of literature. This involved, among other things, coordinating several projects aimed at communities with low literacy rates. Dr. Ayarza also coordinated a program seeking to enrich the reading experience of high school teachers within the city. During his tenure at the National University of Colombia, he taught writing communication workshops while simultaneously working for the Network of Public Libraries and the Department of Education as a literary workshop coordinator.
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