A Conversation with Elena Poniatowska and Michael K. Schuessler

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Elena Poniatowska was born in 1932 in Paris and raised in Mexico. Her best-selling works include Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (1969; Here’s to You, Jesusa!, 2001), based on the life-story of a poor working-class woman who fought in the Mexican Revolution; Noche de Tlatelolco (1971; Massacre in Mexico, 1975), a personal exploration of the 1968 massacre of students at the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City; and Tinísima (1992; Tinísima, 1996), a historical novel inspired by the life of photographer and militant activist Tina Modotti. Poniatowska has also written essays examining the life and work of prominent Mexican women artists. In 2001 she was awarded the internationally-renowned Alfaguara Prize for her novel La piel del cielo. Her historical novel Leonora (2011) was awarded the Biblioteca Breve prize. Americas Society’s journal, Review:  Literature and Arts of the Americas, has published excerpts from Here’s to You, Jesusa! and Tinísima, and has followed Poniatowska’s work over the years.

Michael K. Schuessler is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City. He is the author of the biographies Guadalupe Amor: La undécima musa [The Eleventh Muse] (1995) and Elena Poniatowska: An Intimate Biography (2006). He is also the editor of Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico, the lost autobiography of Alma Reed, “La Peregrina” (2007). Schuessler is now working on a novel, An American Princess: The Life and Times of Agnes Elisabeth Winona Leclerq Joy, Princess Salm-Salm, a fellow-traveler to Maximilian’s court in Mexico; an excerpt appeared in Review 84 (Spring 2012).