THE ANCA CRISTOFOVICI INTERVIEW. QUARTERLY CONVERSATION

Interview by Ellen Hinsey — Published on September 12, 2016 Published in Issue 45  

photo by Sophie Kandaouroff, Rowohlt Foundation

STELA in the Pacific North West, May 2018

While a visiting scholar at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle, Cristofovici read from her novel for the Art Lecture Series at Evergreen College in Olympia and at the Hugo House in Seattle.
http://blogs.evergreen.edu/artistlectureseries/
https://hugohouse.org/event/innovations-contemporary-novel/
https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2018/05/welcome-visiting-scholar-anca-cristofovici

European School of Political and Social Sciences, Lille Europe, March 16, 2018

Cristofovici's novel, Stela, was featured in the European literature course of ESPOL for 1st and 3rd year students. The students presented Cristofovici's work and discussed aspects of the novel. They exchanged with the author about European history and literature, about where we are in terms of Eastern and Western Europe today, and about the relationship between "the political" and "the poetic".

In her lecture, "Le mur invisible: l'écrivain europééen après 1989,"  (The Invisible Wall: Where European Writers Stand After 1989) Cristofovici discussed the situation of international (or supra-national) writers over the past thirty years. The work of writers who are independent of national identifications and languages still remains little known, if not totally ignored, in spite of globalization being the issue of the day. Considering a wide range of writers who have written in more than one language and lived in more than one country, would — Cristofovici argues — contribute to a more complete picture of European literature and of world literature, for that matter.

New York, April 2017
Fashion Institute of Technology, English and Communication Program
"Traveling Through Language" : about languages and other transformations: poetry into fiction, fiction into art projects.

AWP Washington D.C. 2017
A signing session for Stela is scheduled on Thursday February 9th, 1:30-2:30 pm. at the Bookfair: Ninebark press, 750 T.

Reviews

Anca Cristofovici's STELA reviewed by Matt Kirkpatrick for Tarpaulin Sky Press

November 2016

"The strength of Stela is in its multivalence. [...] Each moment of the novel is like a splintered dream of lives interrupted, rendered in electric prose. [...]"

Ninebark and the Micro-Press Movement by David G Pace for 15 Bites. Utah's Art Magazine.

October 2015 

"Readers are allowed to enter the work, and work themselves at interpretation through feeling and thought to a level that you won't find available in your typical pot-boiler."

READING-France

Anca Cristofovici will read from her novel, Stela, on
Thursday, June 16th, 7:30 p.m.at BERKELEY BOOKS of Paris

She will be introduced by author Anne Marsella http://annemarsella.com

Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference - Los Angeles

I will be happy to meet with readers and friends at the Ninebark Press book table. A signing session will also be scheduled at the Cuneiform Press book table for a volume I have co-edited: The Art of Collaboration: Artists, Poets, Books, published in August 2015.

http://cuneiformpress.com/?product=the-art-of-collaboration-poets-artists-books 

READINGS United States

Cristofovici's reading tour in the US includes:
        • Thursday, October 22, 2015, 7:00 pm., Utah Book Festival, The King's English Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.utahhumanities.org/index.php/component/com_bookfestival  /Itemid,288/id,266/view,event/
        • Thursday, October 29, 2015, 7:30 p.m., Berry College, McAllister Auditorium, Mount Berry, Georgia
 READING TOUR IMPRESSIONS, October 2015 PRESS

http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/ninebark-and-the-micro-press-movement/

ART EVENTS

Fragments of Stela in association to artwork by Marsha McDonald and Daniel Cristofovici, as well as the book trailer have been included in the 3rd edition of The Venice Vending Machine, an installation featuring international artists, curated by Marina Moreno, Serra dei Giardini, Venezia, September 22-October 4, 2015.
Exibition Catalogue
 http://www.venicevendingmachine3.com/

Book trailer

"Stela" by Anca Cristofovici - Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PC0w_cNQds

With original film beads by Marsha McDonald. Produced by Tyler Marino.
Cover art : Marsha McDonald, "Lampmoons", photographic collage, 2013. 

About the author
Anca Cristofovici is a trilingual European writer, born in Romania and currently living in France, where she is a professor of American literature and art. She has also studied and taught in the United States.

 

Representative of her multicultural experience, her publication background includes essays, translations, fiction, and poetry, published in English, French, and Romanian, in Europe and the United States. She is the author of John Hawkes. L'enfant & le cannibale (Paris: Belin, 1997), a book of essays on photography, Touching Surfaces (N.Y./Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009), and main editor of The Art of Collaboration. Artists, Poets, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform, 2015). Her poetry translations include Ana Blandiana, The Hour of Sand (London: Anvil, 1989;1990, currently with Carcanet.)

Cristofovici's fiction in English has appeared in American literary journals and online internatinal artists' platforms, and she has been invited to read work at venues in the Unites States and Europe, including Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee; The Fashion Institute, New York; Hugo House, Seattle; the English Cambridge Seminar; Poetry International at Royal Festival Hall, London; and WICE, Paris.

Among her honors are grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Université Paris-Sorbonne, and The British Academy, and writers' residencies at Villa Mont Noir, France and at The Rowohlt Foundation, Château de Lavigny, Switzerland.

                                                         

About the novel

A woman has been declared dead following a car accident. In a climate of doubt, her teenage daughter suspects other possibilities. As she persists in untangling a web of whispers and rumors about her mother's mysterious disappearance, Cora — a young creative dancer — makes her way out from the perimeter of fear and step by step takes off layers of trauma.  
Unsparingly precise about life under oppressive circumstances, the novel explores the strategies of survival in a world of vanishing presences. Intensly poetic with a startling touch of humor, it mitigates loss through the transformative powers of art: found footage, a video piece reminscent of Bill Viola, body work evocative of Merce Cunnigham's quest of form into chaos.

Stela is a novel of uncanny suspense about loss and the forms it takes to carry life farther.