Susan D. Rivera

Associate Professor of Spanish

Ortega Hall 421
E-mail: susanar@unm.edu

Research areas:

• Nineteenth century Peninsular literature
• Twentieth century Peninsular literature
• Twenty-first century Peninsular literature

I first realized I had a passion for literature as I sat around the kitchen table with my brother and two sisters listening to my mother tell stories, the same stories that she had heard her mother recount while sitting around the flame of a kerosene lamp in her small village of Quitupan, Jalisco. Years later that passion was kindled when I heard other relatives, neighbors and friends in Santa Fe relate their own stories in the beautiful New Mexican dialect. When I entered the University of New Mexico I had the privilege of studying with the extraordinary Spanish and French professors of what was then the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and I immediately knew that literature was going to be a determining force in my life. Through their wisdom and that of the authors we studied I learned that literature teaches people about humanity, the world, other cultures, and ultimately about oneself, all through the beauty and power of language. After five years at the University of Oklahoma my life came full circle when I was offered a position at the same university that taught me so much. I am honored to teach in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and if I can do for just one student what my professors did for me I will feel that I accomplished something useful. I first traveled to Spain in 1979 and quickly realized that I also needed to know the Spanish stories in order to complete not only my formal education but also my sentimental one. I have since become one of the leading experts on the second generation of Spanish poets exiled in Mexico after the civil war, my anthology of this important, but relatively unknown group of writers, was published by Editorial Hiperión. Some of my other work includes studies of poets Antonio Machado, Valle-Inclán, Gerardo Diego, Francisco Brines, Luis Rosales, and Ángel González who was also my beloved husband, as well as novelists Pérez Galdós and Caballero Bonald, my critical edition of the latter’s Ágata ojo de gato appeared in Cátedra. My current research and teaching interests continue to center on contemporary Spanish poetry and narrative, but I am also delving into film and am fascinated by the image of women in literature and film.