Variations on the Body

María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a professor of Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. Her first book of fiction, the short story collection Azares del cuerpo, was published in Colombia, Chile, and Spain, and was translated into Italian and English (Variations on the Body). Her stories have appeared in Colombian anthologies and in literary magazines in the United States. She has also written extensively about contemporary Colombian culture in light of legacies of extractivism, violence, and war, including the book Memory’s Conundrum: Literature, Film, and Testimony at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Only a Little While Here, winner of the Colombian National Novel Award (2024) and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Literature (2023) is her first novel.

Heather Cleary’s translations include Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, BTBA 2013) and The Dark (nominee, National Translation Award 2014), and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has served as a judge for the BTBA and the PEN Translation Award. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translator collective and a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires Review.