The Queen of Swords Tour: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro
Princeton, NJ | Brooklyn, NY | Washington DC | Dallas, TX | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA
Author Jazmina Barrera, on tour from Mexico City, and translator Megan McDowell join forces to celebrate the life and work of Elena Garro.
This national tour celebrates the publication of The Queen of Swords, Barrera’s literary portrait of Elena Garro, and McDowell’s translation of The Week of Colors, a collection of Elena Garro’s short stories.
Tour Schedule
Wednesday, November 5 | 1:00 pm EST
México Now Festival: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro
Online Event
Wednesday, November 12 | 6:00 pm EST
Princeton: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton, NY
Thursday, November 13 | 6:30 pm EST
CUNY: Speaking Across Languages with Jazmina Barrera and María Julia Rossi
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
Friday, November 14 | 7:00 pm EST
Brooklyn: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro with Tara Westover
Community Bookstore, 143 7th Ave., Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, November 16 | 5:00 pm EST
DC: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro with Lily Meyer
Lost City Books, 2467 18th St. NW, Washington, DC
Monday, November 17 | 7:00 pm CST
Dallas: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro with Sean Cotter
The Wild Detectives, 314 W 8th St., Dallas, TX
Wednesday, November 19 | 7:00 pm PST
San Francisco: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro
Medicine for Nightmares, 3036 24th St., San Francisco, CA
Thursday, November 20 | 7:00 pm PST
Seattle: Megan McDowell on The Week of Colors (Megan McDowell only)
Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA
Saturday, November 22
Miami Book Fair: National Book Foundation Presents the 2025 Honorees (Jazmina Barrera only)
NBF Presents: The 2025 National Book Award Honorees for Translated Literature
Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus | 12:30 pm EST | More Info(opens in a new tab)
NBF Presents: Lightning Round with the 2025 National Book Awards
Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus | 6:00 pm EST | More Info(opens in a new tab)
Presented by the National Book Foundation and the Miami Book Fair
About The Queen of Swords
In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life. Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?
She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism”, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and the I Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.
The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.
About The Week of Colors
Published in tandem with The Queen of Swords, The Week of Colors makes the short stories of Elena Garro, the “cursed mother of magical realism” (El Mundo), available in English for the first time.
With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In this volume, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.
Jazmina Barrera’s books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Her book Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize by Literal Publishing, and On Lighthouses was chosen for the Indie Next list by IndieBound. Linea Nigra was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize, CANIEM’s Book of the Year award, and the Amazon Primera Novela (First Novel) Award. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.
Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.