Join us for an in-person event. A book talk with CUNY BA Alumna Pennell Somsen, translator of Medusa reina (Ficticia, 2025)
Author Roberto Azcorra Cámara delves into the intimacy of relationships to reveal how, even through misfortune, a path remains, sometimes luminous, sometimes dark, always unexpected. CUNY BA Alumna and translator of Medusa reina, Pennell Somsen, joins our author in conversation moderated by CUNY Professor, Esther Allen.
Date and Time: Thursday, September 17, 2026, at 3:00 PM
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY in Midtown Manhattan
365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Room: Kelly Skylight Room (Ninth Floor)
Building Entrance Policy: To enter the Graduate Center, all students, faculty, and staff are required to show a valid CUNY ID at the front desk. Non-CUNY visitors are required to show a government-issued photo ID upon entering the building.
Bios
Roberto Azcorra Cámara is a Mexican fiction writer and university professor. He is the author of two short story collections: Medusa reina (2025) and Disparados a la luna (2009), both published by Ficticia. English translations of his work have been published in various journals. His fiction has also appeared in La Casa ciega, vol. 5 (EDAF, Madrid, 2006). In 2002, he compiled Litoral del relámpago, an anthology of contemporary Yucatecan literature. In 1999, he received the Premio Nacional Carmen Báez in Morelia. He co-authored the play El Quijote, Historias andantes, which premiered in 2019 and won Best Dramaturgy at FESTITIM in 2022.
Esther Allen is a writer, translator, and professor at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her translation of Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto won the National Translation Award for Prose in 2017. Her essays, translations, and interviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, The New Yorker, and other publications.
Pennell Somsen is a proud graduate of CUNYBA. Her translations of stories by Roberto Azcorra Cámara, Nadia Villafuerte, and Sonia Rivera Valdés have appeared in the Rio Grande Review, Latin American Literature Today, Delos Journal, Midway Journal, InTranslation (Brooklyn Rail), Reunion: The Dallas Review, Tampa Review, The Laurel Review, Your Impossible Voice, Translators’ Corner (Instituto Cervantes/Harvard University), and the Good Life Review.
Medusa reina Book Summary
Medusa reina (Ficticia, 2025) Roberto Azcorra Cámara delves into the intimacy of relationships to reveal how, even through misfortune, a path remains, sometimes luminous, sometimes dark, always unexpected. The stories explore multiple forms of affection: romantic love, maternal devotion, forbidden desire, grief through the lens of memory, urban space, and emotional conflict. Five of the stories share a recurring protagonist at different stages of life, creating a narrative arc that reads almost as a game for the attentive reader. The stories of this book don’t end definitively; instead, they leave the outcome to the protagonists and the reader.
Book Link: https://ficticia.com/catalogo/258