Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky, 1961) is an American writer and academic.

He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 to a middle-class Jewish family; his father's ancestors had immigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement.

His parents were born in Mexico City.

His father, Abraham Stavans, was a Mexican telenovela actor.

His mother, Ofelia Stavans, taught theater.

Stavans traces the artistic development of Márquez from childhood to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in 1967 (it was translated by Gregory Rabassa and published in English in 1970).

After living in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, Stavans immigrated to the United States in 1985, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1994.

He earned a master's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a PhD from Columbia University.

He has also received international prizes and honors for his writings, including the Latino Literature Prize (Latin American Writers Institute, New York), 1992, for his novella Talia y el cielo (Talia in heaven); Chile's Presidential Medal; and the Rubén Darío Distinction.

Stavans writes on Jewish-American identity as Eurocentric and parochial.

Since 1993 he has been on the faculty at Amherst College, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture.

He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common.

He has taught at various other institutions, including Columbia University.

In 1994 he published the anthology Tropical Synagogues: Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers (1994).

Stavans's work includes both scholarly monographs, such as The Hispanic Condition (1995), and comic strips, as in his graphic book Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000).

From 1997 to 2005 he edited the Jewish Latin America series published by the University of New Mexico Press.

Stavans has edited anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998).

In 1998, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans.

He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.

His autobiography is entitled On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001).

He is best known for his investigations of language and culture.

In his The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture (2001), he explores Jewish writing in every major language, including variations such as Yiddish, Ladino, and others.

His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

He has been influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Wilson, and Walter Benjamin.

(In his autobiography, Stavans says that in the early stages of his career, in order to find his own style, he burned his collection of dozens of Borges's books, p. 9.) He has written a biography of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, a Chicano lawyer.

He wrote a book-long meditation on Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

He wrote a preface in Spanglish to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi.

In 2004, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, Stavans edited the 1,000-page-long The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.

The same year he edited the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories for the Library of America.

His love for lexicography is evident in his memoir, Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005).

He has written influential essays on the Mexican comedian, Mario Moreno ("Cantinflas"); the lampooner José Guadalupe Posada, the Chicano leader César Chávez, and the Tejana singer Selena.

He wrote a book about the board game Lotería! (with Teresa Villegas), which includes his own poems.

Stavans was featured in one of the Smithsonian Q&A books.

His anthology, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005), received a National Jewish Book Award.

He wrote a biography, Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (2010), the first of two planned volumes.

He is the author of Quixote (2015) and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010).

He has been a critic of the nostalgia in this community for the past of the Eastern European shtetls of the 19th century.

His work explores Jewish culture in the Hispanic world.