Portuguese Voice in U.S. Lit Celebrated at Jfk Library

Summary

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That heritage and [Katherine Vaz]'s experiences at home have both found their way into her published works. Her family's stories, filled with religious undertones and gripping drama, permeate her novels "Fado and Other Stories," winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and "Mariana," which has been translated into six languages and is now in its seventh edition.

At Saturday's colloquium, [Frank X. Gaspar] shared the stage with Canadian novelist Erika de Vasconcelos, whose works include "My Darling Dead Ones" and "Between the Stillness and the Grove," and American short story writer Julian Silva, author of "Distant Music: Two Novels."

"People are such a big combination of things," continued Vaz, whose mother is Irish and father hails from the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. "[Ethnic diversity] is wonderful for a storyteller because it gives you [an] ambiguity to start with."

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Portuguese Voice in U.S. Lit Celebrated at Jfk Library

Every culture has its own traditions, and as Katherine Vaz explains it, some traditions die hard.

One day, Vaz returned home to find a votive lamp burning inside her kitchen sink. The lamp was lit by her father in a desperate attempt to protect Vaz's sister, whose home burglar alarm had been triggered, prompting a call from the security comp...

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