Hill Center & PEN/Faulkner Present:
Brando Skyhorse in conversation with Lisa Page
Monday, March 9th, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Free (Please register for your free tickets here)
The next installment of the Hill Center & PEN/Faulkner Literary Reading Series features Brando Skyhorse, author of The Madonnas of Echo Park and Take This Man, in conversation with Lisa Page, Acting Director of Creative Writing, The George Washington University.
When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery online leads him to his biological father at last.
From an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist celebrated for his “indelible storytelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine), this extraordinary literary memoir captures a son’s single-minded search for a father wherever he can find one, and is destined to become a classic.
Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. He has been awarded fellowships at Ucross and Can Serrat, Spain. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine. He is the 2014-15 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Residence at George Washington University.
Lisa Page is the Acting Director of Creative Writing at George Washington University. She is a longtime PEN/Faulkner board member, and past President.