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A renowned cultural critic, lexicographer, editor, and publisher of Restless Books, Stavans has covered myriad topics related to language and Latin American and Jewish life. His latest book is How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, coedited with Josh Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center. It offers an illuminating look at the role Yiddish has played in the Americas. Famously a language without a country, Yiddish, as these memoirs, stories, poems, recipes, and conversations show, has been key to shaping the way we eat, talk, joke, and think in a territory extending from the Lower East Side to Hollywood, Canada, Mexico, and throughout South America. Stavans will be in conversation with Corey Flintoff, former NPR international correspondent.

When: Tuesday, February 11, 7 PM–8 PM

Where: Politics & Prose at the Wharf, Washington DC

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast.”

Corey Flintoff is a writer based in Maryland. He spent four years as NPR’s bureau chief for Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Other assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Haiti. Since retiring from NPR in 2016, he has devoted himself to writing short fiction, winning awards and publication in literary journals around the country.

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