About Marc Zimmerman

Marc Zimmerman has written and edited over forty books, including ones on European, Latin American, Caribbean and Latino cultural and literary studies as well as his much-praised “Illusions of Memory” autofiction series, in which memories tend toward fictional form while representing the author’s life and the many marking his path. Zimmerman is Professor Emeritus of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) as well as Hispanic Studies and World Cultures and Literatures in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston (UH). He has won Fulbright, Rockefeller and other major awards has served as founder/director of LACASA Chicago since 1998.

Zimmerman holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California San Diego, where he studied with Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse, Claudio Guillén, Michel Benamou and George Szanto; he also holds an M.A. in Creative Writing (Language Arts) from San Francisco State University, where he studied with Herbert Blau, Martin Halperin, Mark Harris, James Scheville, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Ray West, and Herbert Wilner. His early stories were published in The Dartmouth Quarterly, Descant, The Great River Review, and in Nuova Prosa, a fiction journal in Milan, Italy. More recent stories have appeared in the Chicago Latino online journal, El BeiSMan, as well as in Voices in Italian Americana, and Literal, a Latin American literary journal based in Houston and Mexico City.

In recent years, Zimmerman has written and published books on U.S. Puerto Rican culture and literature and Chicago Mexican history and culture. In addition, he has coordinated the development of a digital series of interviews and related materials dealing with Chicago Latino art; he has donated these materials to the Smithsonian Institution, which has now organized many of them as a component of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Project. Based on this ongoing work, Zimmerman has thus far published several articles, as well as texts centered on Chicago Mexican artists. He is currently developing a book of essays on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Central American, Cuban, Dominican and South American artists in Chicago.

Returning to his first love of creative writing, Zimmerman has been developing his Illusions of Memory series with books on Jewish, Italian, African and Latin American as well as U.S. Latino themes, and four of the books appearing in Spanish translation.

Zimmerman has recently lectured on Chicago Latino art at Dartmouth College, the U. of California Berkeley and San Diego, Purdue University and the Universidad de Costa Rica. He has read from his fiction in Italy at Milano’s Verso Bookstore and the Torino International Book Fair, in California at the University Press Book Store in Berkeley, the Tía Chucha Cultural Center in Sylmar, the Media Center in San Diego, the Avid Reader in Davis, and the Green Arcade in San Francisco—as well as in public libraries in East Los Angeles and La Jolla. In Chicago, he has read for the Palabra Pura program of the Guild Literary Complex, the Heirloom Bookstore, and the Rudy Lozano Public Library. In Puerto Rico, he has read at Librería Laberinto in San Juan and Librería Candil in Ponce, as well as in a seminar at El Centro de Estudios Avanzados in el Viejo San Juan.

He and his wife Esther Soler from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, divide each year between the island and the Wicker Park/ Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. They continue to travel each year to Minnesota, California and abroad. They hope to get back to Iberia, Italy, Mexico and South America in the near future.

• For bio-bib of most articles & books, visit http://amazon.com/author/marczimmerman
• For most recent on-line version of his cv visit https://silo.tips/download/curriculum-vitae-marc-j-zimmerman