Alice Weldon

ALICE WELDON, a native of North Carolina, with a BA from Duke University, and MA and PhD from the University of Maryland, serves currently as an associate professor of Spanish and co-director of the women’s studies program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. In addition to literary criticism on Spanish-American women writers and co-authored pedagogical articles on service-learning in Spanish, Weldon has published literary translations, including the novel Son of the Murdered Maid/¡Hijo de Opa! by Bolivian Gaby Vallejo. Currently, she is co-authoring a work on team teaching in Spanish and one on flexibility and motherhood/non-motherhood status in a small liberal arts university. She is also working on a book with five colleagues at UNCA on the rewards of an interdisplinary faculty scholarly writing group.

Weldon lived for several years in the altiplano of Bolivia, where she was co-founder of Andean Rural Health Care, a preventive community-based health care system now known as Curamericas. She has actively participated in local social-justice and peace groups, including serving on the board of directors for the UNA-USA and World Affairs.

Weldon is the mother of two academics and the grateful grandmother of three.

MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Q: What inspired you to write?
A: Reading novels and living in/through situations of injustice or hopefulness; wanting others to learn and enjoy as much as I when reading Viene clareando (or other works in Spanish)

Q: What was your favorite book as a child?
A: The Bobbsey Twins

Q: What book is on your bedside table?
A: Giocondi Belli, Apogeo

Q: Who is your favorite heroine in literature, or, if you prefer, in real life?
A: Rigoberta Menchú

Q: Who is your favorite hero in literature, or in real life?
A: Martin Luther King

Q: If you could eat dinner with three authors, who would they be?
A: All at the same time? Arundhati Roy, bell hooks, Gloria Lisé; Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Gaby Vallejo Canedo; Anne Lamont, Luisa Valenzuela, Alice Walker

Q: What book would you like to be able to read again for the first time?
A: Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows

Q: What book changed your life?
A:Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness