Margo Glantz fused Yiddish literature, Mexican culture, and French tradition to create experimental new works of literature. Glanz graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1953 and earned a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Mexico to teach literature and theater history at UNAM. A prolific essayist, she is best known for her 1987 autobiography Las genealogías (The Genealogies), which blended her experiences of growing up Jewish in Catholic Mexico with her parents’ immigrant experiences. She also wrote fiction and nonfiction that shed new light on the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Among her many honours, she won the Magda Donato Prize for Las genealogías and received a Rockefeller Grant (1996) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998).She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (2005), the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (2010), and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2011). Glantz was awarded the 2004 National Prize for Sciences and the prestigious FIL Prize in 2010. She received Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2015.

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine , Slug and The London Magazine .