Franco Laguna Correa
Franco Alessandro Laguna Correa was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a writer, ethnographer, musician/composer, and college professorwho belongs, or has been included by literary critics, in the so-called New Latino Boom, which is a literary movement that features 21st-century Latin American fiction authors writing in Spanish in the United States. He was awarded in 2012 the National Literary Prize of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), an institution based in New York City. In 2013, he received the International Poetry Prize of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes. In 2016 , Laguna Correa was one of the recipients of The Fuerza Award, a social recognition for his intellectual activism in the Pittsburgh area granted by The City of Pittsburgh, the collective Café con Leche, and The Latin American Cultural Union (LACU). The "Chicago Review of Books" recommended his book "Crush Me (a broken novel)" for the 2017 National Poetry Month. His novel "Wild North" was included in the list of best Mexican fiction of 2017 selected by author Antonio Ortuño and published in the daily newspaper "El Informador". He has been invited to deliver talks about his research at various institutions , including Emory University, the University of California, Texas State University, and Duke University. Education & Teaching. He graduated from the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in 2001 after being forced to interrupt his studies due to the 1999 UNAM strike. He began his university studies at The School of Philosophy and Letters and The School of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which is often cited as the most prestigious university of the Spanish-speaking world. He completed his undergraduate education at Portland State University, where he received a double BA in Liberal Studies and Literature. In addition , he completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Pittsburgh and two M.A. degrees, one in Social Anthropology and another in Philosophy, both at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He was the recipient in 2014 of the K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2016 he received a doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in Cultural and Literary Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thereafter, he held researching and teaching appointments at High Point University and the University of Denver. Music & Sonic Endeavors. Over the course of the last three years, Franco Alessandro  has devoted extensive time to the composition and performance of various forms of sonic and musical ensembles. Besides taking singing lessons both in Europe and the United States, he has taken his theoretical interests in sonic borderspaces to the realm of music creation. He has recorded a few symphonic pieces that feature only vocal acoustic renderings of his voices. Based on his personal interests and recorded pieces, Franco Alessandro has termed his music as "sonic realities" and his personal performative style as "Post-Modern Troubadour". The Immigration Quartet. Wild North (novel) is the first piece of the series The Immigration  Quartet. The second is the experimental and fragmented novella, which uses stylistic techniques from prose poetry, Crush Me/(broken novel) that Laguna Correa wrote in English and that in 2013 was awarded the International Poetry Prize of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes. In 2017 the independent publisher, based in Chicago, Radical Narratives released the book and that same year the "Chicago Review of Books" included "Crush Me" in their list of books to celebrate the National Poetry Month. The third book of the series is the noir novel of suspense Ortodoxa: contra-manual, which was one of the finalists of the  Equis Prize of Novel in 2015, subsequently in 2018 the publisher, based in Miami, Suburbano Ediciones published "Ortodoxa". The last book of the "Immigration Quartet" is the testimonial and semi-autobiographic novel of suspense, torture and psychological realism Acedia, published in California by Rayo Press in 2020.