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This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Barbara Renaud Gonzalez
In Spanish, the word Golondrina refers to a small and undistinguished swallow; however, the word has evoked a thousand poems and songs dedicated to the migrant's departure and hoped-for return. The swallow in Golondrina, why did you leave me? is Amada García, a young Mexican woman in a brutal marriage, who makes a heart-wrenching decision—to leave her young daughter behind in Mexico as she escapes to el Norte searching for love. She falls for the man who brings her to the Texas border, and the memories of those three passionate days forever sustain and define her journey in Texas. Amada meets and marries Lázaro Mistral, who is on his own journey—to reclaim the land his family lost after the U.S.-Mexican War. Their opposing narratives about love and war become the legacy of their first-born daughter, Lucero, who must reconcile their stories into her struggle to find "home." González, a native-born Tejana and acclaimed journalist and activist, has written a lyrical story of land, love, and loss, bringing us the first novel of a working-class Tejano family set in the cruelest beauty of the Texas panhandle. Irma Mayorga, an assistant professor of theatre at Florida State University writes of Golondrina that, "Like celebrated Mexican American authors that proceed her, Renaud González accomplishes the task not only of fleshing out her theme in unique, melodious, and astounding ways that confound genres, but she triumphs even more so due to her deft, exhilarating, and virtuosic command of the written language."
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