February 21, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, recently received the National Jewish Book Award for The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, which he edited in 2005.
A member of the Amherst faculty since 1993, Stavans is also author of Growing up Latino (1993), The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003) and most recently Dictionary Days (2005.) Stavans has published the first dictionary of Spanglish, titled Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), and has debated in public the role language plays in public life and civic affairs for African Americans, Latinos and other immigrant groups. Stavans also published a selection of the interviews that he conducted on Conversations with Ilan Stavans on the WGBH (PBS) program La Plaza. He is the editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.
The Jewish Book Council promotes the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America, and sponsors a variety of activities and programs, among them the National Jewish Book Awards, established in 1948/9, and the Jewish Book Month. Its publications include Jewish Book Annual and Jewish Book World.
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