Anna Kazumi Stahl is a fiction writer based in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on transnational (East-West) identities in South American, U.S. and German literatures. Her current research explores South-South and East Asian-South American transnational cultural expressions in literature and visual media.
As a fiction writer, she works almost exclusively in Spanish. Her book-length works are: Catastrofes naturales (Editorial Sudamericana, 1997) and Flores de un solo día (Seix Barral, 2003), the latter a finalist for the Romulos Gallegos Prize. Stahl’s fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals in Latin America, Europe, Japan, and the USA. She is currently completing a novel based in Buenos Aires, in the southern neighborhoods where historically an Asian immigrant enclave took root and later other immigrants and regional migrations passed through. In the novel three individuals of differing generations and national cultural origins converge in Argentina leading to a story that pits historical undercurrents against an individual wish to recreate oneself and start anew.
Also an active translator, Stahl has worked on film projects (for writers like Ricardo Piglia and directors like Hector Babenco and Lucrecia Martel) and on book-length fiction and cultural studies. Stahl has taught Creative Writing & Literary Analysis at New York University’s study abroad program in Buenos Aires since 2008. Currently she directs the NYU Buenos Aires program, which hosts over 300 students per year in Buenos Aires. Since 2015, she has served as John Maxwell Coetzee’s academic coordinator for seminars and colloquia he directs through Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de San Martin, for on-going comparative work on Literatures of the Southern Hemisphere connecting writers and translators between the countries and cultures of Australia/New Zealand, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Anna will be a writer in residence in April 2019. This position is sponsored by the ARC Discovery Project “Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature”, a partnership between Western Sydney University and the University of Adelaide.
Select bibliography:
- Stahl, Anna Kazumi and Karin Lanzoni, ‘The Genogram Game & Croppings’, The Asian American Literary Review, vol. 4, issue 2, 2013, pp. 49-105.
- Stahl, Anna Kazumi, ‘De Hombres, Ciervos y Cangrejos’ (‘Of Men, Deer, and Crabs’), AND Cultura, L Nación, 26 January 2008.
- Stahl, Anna Kazumi, ‘Natural Disasters’, from A Whistler in the Nightworld: Short Fiction from the Latin Americas, edited by Thomas Colchie, New York: Plume, 2002, pp. 58-84.
- Stahl, Anna Kazumi, Catástrofes Naturales (Toshi’s Tango Dream), Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1997.