Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman (born 1954) is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. He is workshop director at Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez. Goldman is also known as Francisco Goldman Molina, "Frank" and "Paco".

Life

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish-American father. Goldman attended Hobart College, the University of Michigan and the New School for Social Research Seminar College, and studied translation at New York University. He has taught at Columbia University in the MFA program; Brooklyn College; the Institute of New Journalism (founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) in Cartagena, Colombia; Mendez Pelayo Summer Institute in Santander, Spain; the North American Institute in Barcelona, Spain. He has been a resident of UCross Foundation. Francisco Goldman was rewarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden fellowship for Fiction and was spring 2010 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

He currently resides in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.

Career

His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In November 2007, he acted as guest-fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. "The Ordinary Seaman" was named one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and of a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship in 2000-2001. His books have been translated and published in a total of eleven languages worldwide. In the 1980s, he covered the wars in Central America as a contributing editor to Harper's magazine.

Goldman's 2007 book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is a nonfiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, a crime perpetrated by the Guatemalan military. The book, an expansion on what began as an article in The New Yorker represents the culmination of years of journalistic investigation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year at Washington Post Book World, The Economist, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News. While the book has been widely acclaimed, to some degree a predictable disinformation campaign of exactly the kind described in the book itself has been waged against it. A new afterword in the paperback edition, rebuts them. The book is the winner of the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and of the 2008 Duke University-WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) Human Rights Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Golden Dagger Award in non-fiction and for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.

Family

Goldman's wife, Aura Estrada, died in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007. Goldman documents his wife' sdeath, as well as his relationship with her, in the story "The Wave" for the February 7, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. He has also established a prize in her honor, The Aura Estrada Prize, to be given every two years to a female writer, 35 or under, who writes in Spanish and lives in the USA or Mexico.

Works

• The Long Night of White Chickens (1992). Grove Atlantic Press, New York; Faber&Faber, London.
• The Ordinary Seaman (1997). Grove Atlantic Press, New York; Faber& Faber, London.
• The Divine Husband (2004). Grove Atlantic Press (US and UK).
• The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop? (2007). Grove Press (US and UK). Non-fiction.
• Say Her Name (2011). Grove Press Press (US and UK).

Selected journalism. criticism and short fiction

• The New Yorker; New York Times Sunday Magazine; New York Review of Books; Book Forum; Esquire; Bomb
• In Mexico: Letras Libres; Gatopardo; Equis.
• Prologue to The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis, published by New York Review of Books Classics, 2003.
• "Murder Comes for the Bishop", The New Yorker, March 15, 1999.
• "The Great Bolaño", The New York Times Review of Books, July 19, 2007.
• "Chapter 1: I Drank the Water", New York Times, June 27, 2007.
• "THE THOROUGHLY DESIGNED AMERICAN CHILDHOOD; A Robot For the Masses", November 28, 2004.
• "In The Shadow Of The Patriarch", New York Times, November 2, 2003.
• "Guatemala's Fictional Democracy", New York Times, November 3, 2003.
• "The Autumn of the Revolutionary", New York Times, August 23, 1998.
• "In Guatemala, All Is Forgotten", New York Times, December 23, 1996
• "In a Terrorized Country", New York Times, April 17, 1995.
• "Ending Up in Downsville", (book review) New York Times, June 20, 1993.
• "Poetry and Power in Nicaragua", New York Times, March 29, 1987.
• Four Op-ed pieces in the New York Times, and two in the Los Angeles Times.

Anthologized

• “Mexico DF” in the Beacon Press Best of 2001.
• ”Moro like Me” in Half and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural.

Translations

• Two short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Playboy Magazine, one of which, “The Trail of your *Blood in the Snow,” won that year’s National Magazine Award for fiction.

Interviews

• "Susan Choi Talks with Francisco Goldman", The Believer, August 2004.
• Francisco Goldman talks to Semi Chellas", Brick: A Literary Journal, Winter 2004 (Issue 74).
• "Literary Guisado: An Interview with Francisco Goldman" by Marion Winik, The Austin Chronicle, June 6, 1997.
• Francisco Goldman discusses his new book "The Divine Husband", NPR Morning Edition, October 27, 2004.
• Interview with Francisco Goldman by Whit Coppedge, Pif Magazine, October 30, 2008.

External links

• Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
• Video: Truth and Reconciliation: A National Reckoning PEN World Voices at LIVE from the New York Public Library May 4, 2008
• Lecture by Goldman on Cuban patriot José Martí's years in New York (1878-1895), from the Key West Literary Seminar, 2004
• Carolyn Curiel (September 30, 2007). "Murder in Guatemala". New York Times.
• Essay, "Six Stories Guest-Edited by Francisco Goldman"
• American Academy in Berlin [1]