Live! At the Library: "A Writing Marriage" by Lori Carlson-Hijuelos

Author Lori Carlson-Hijuelos will discuss her new memoir about the life she shared with her husband, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013), whose personal papers are preserved at the Library of Congress. She includes excerpts from his unfinished novel, "Blue Antiquity."A book signing will follow the program.

Carlson-Hijuelos will reflect on life shared with her husband, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Cuban-American author Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013).  The memoir tells their love story and addresses their respective writing careers and themes of collaboration, spirituality, destiny, and coping with grief and death. Carlson-Hijuelos incorporates  passages from Hijuelos’s semi-autobiographical unfinished novel, "Blue Antiquity," draft portions of which are part of the Oscar Hijuelos Papers collection in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.

Carlson-Hijuelos studied Hispanic literature and began a career in bilingual editing, writing, and Spanish translation before she met Oscar Hijuelos in 1981.  She interviewed Hijuelos in 1983 about his newly published first novel, "Our House in the Last World," which is set in Cuba and the United States, at her workplace, the Americas Society in New York City, and introduced him to other Latino writers.  His breakout success came in 1989 with the publication of his second novel, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," and his selection in 1990 as the first Latino American  awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The two married in December 1998.