Weissman School of Arts and Sciences

Francisco Goldman

Francisco GoldmanSidney Harman Writer-in-Residence
Fall 2005

 

Photo Credit: Pia Elizondo 

 

When Maria de las Nieves Moran crossed from convent school to cloister to become a novice nun, it was to prevent Paquita Aparicio, her beloved childhood companion, from marrying the man both girls called “El Anticristo.” Of course, that is not the version known to history. Maria de las Nieves became one of “the English Nun’s” last two novice nuns, and took as her religious name Sor San Jorge—Slayer of Dragons, Defender of Virgins. She did understand that she was living in a time that called for acts of selfless valor, and that by her own self-sacrifice she was eternally sealing Paquita’s sacred vow not to engage in conjugal relations until she—Maria de las Nieves/Sor San Jore—had first.

— From The Divine Husband

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN is the author of three novels: The Long Night of White Chickens, which won the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award; The Ordinary Seaman, which was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Fiction Prize, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner award and was named one of the “Best Hundred American Books of the Century” by Hungry Mind Review; and The Divine Husband, published in 2005. His novels have been published in 10 languages.

As a contributing editor for Harper's, he covered Central America in the 1980s. His work has appeared in many other magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1998 and was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2000-2001. He is a member of the executive board of American PEN.

In 2006, he will publish Who Didn’t Kill the Bishop? The Story of a Perfect Crime, a non-fiction work on the Bishop Gerardi murder case in Guatemala.

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