Dr. Eric Morales-Franceschini wins the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize

New York, NY – 6 December 2023 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced its thirty-third annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. The winner is Éric Morales-Franceschini, associate professor of English and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Georgia, for The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation, published by the University of Virginia Press. Javier Guerrero, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University, has received an honorable mention for his book Escribir después de morir: El archivo y el más allá, published by Ediciones Metales Pesados. 

The Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize was established in 1990 by a gift from Joseph and Mimi B. Singer, parents of the late Katherine Singer Kovacs. The prize is one of twenty-two awards that will be presented on 5 January 2024 during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia. The members of the selection committee were Frederick Luis Aldama (Univ. of Texas, Austin), chair; Samuel Amago (Univ. of Virginia); Persephone Braham (Univ. of Delaware, Newark); Anna M. Nogar (Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque); and John Ochoa (Penn State Univ., University Park). The committee’s citation for Morales-Franceschini’s book reads: 

Innovative and methodically daring, Éric Morales-Franceschini’s The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation offers an urgently needed new perspective on Cuban history. His nuanced analysis of race, gender, and memory in the construction of the Afro-Cuban mambí as archetype in the cultural imaginary across a range of narrative forms (literature, hymns, textbooks, art, history, politics, film, hip-hop, graffiti, and town festivals, among others), delivered in elegant prose, makes for a moving, learned, and insightful new understanding of the forces at play in Cuba’s shaping of an aesthetics of liberation.