SUMMER BOOK AND GOODY BAG GIVEAWAY!

Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona. She spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, bouncing from man to man and job to job while immersing herself in books and dancing. She freelanced for prestigious publishing houses, traveled the world as a tour leader, and worked for the Olympic Committee. In 1992 she moved to the U.S. to enter a PhD program on Spanish and Latin American Contemporary Literature at the University of California, Berkeley; she also taught at this university Spanish language, literature, culture, and creative writing for twelve years. After a ten-year stint in the corporate world, in 2016 Isidra quit her job to dedicate herself to writing creative nonfiction in English. Since then, her essays have been widely published in literary journals and general interest online publications. Her piece “My Books and I” was listed as Notable in the Best American Essays Anthology (2019).

Her debut memoir “Promenade of Desire—A Barcelona Memoir” will come out October 2022 at She Writes Press.

Isidra is also the author of a collection of short stories (Juego de voces, Ediciones Navegante, 1997, Austin, TX) and an academic book that won the Mercè Rodoreda Award given by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona in 1997, and was published in Catalan and in English (Mercè Rodoreda: An Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 2004, Lanham, Maryland).