On Friday, Dec. 1 at 12:30 p.m. in St. Ambrose Hall, the Fairfield Bellarmine program will welcome author Victoria Buitron MFA’20 to Bellarmine Campus for a conversation about her career path as a writer and her award-winning memoir, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, published by Woodhall Press. This event is free and open to the public – all are invited to attend.

Buitron received her undergraduate degree from Hunter College CUNY, and is a 2022 graduate of Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing program. “Getting an opportunity to speak about my creative writing journey is always a delight and honor,” she said, “but even more so at the place that made it all come true. I’m ecstatic to get to spend an afternoon at Fairfield.”

Buitron is described on the Woodhall Press website as “a freelance writer and translator whose work delves into the intersections of identity and place, family history, and the moments her hippocampus refuses to forget.” Her debut collection of autobiographical essays tells the coming-of-age story of her search for home between Ecuador and Connecticut.

Author and editor-in-chief of (mac)ro(mic) Nick Olson reviewed A Body Across Two Hemispheres and described it as “a memoir that pushes the very limits of the medium, looking at what trauma writes in the story of a life—and the palimpsests that can be made after. Of family as a continuous act, a choice. Of love that defies state injustice and separation of time and place. These essays are groundbreaking, vital, revelatory.”

Buitron was the winner of the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize for A Body Across Two Hemispheres, an award sponsored by Woodhall Press in partnership with the Fairfield University MFA in Creative Writing program.

A VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) fellow, her work appears in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and has been selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023. She received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Buitron is currently the competitions editor for Harbor Review, and editor of the recently released 2023 Connecticut Literary Anthology.

Victoria Buitron’s author visit to Fairfield Bellarmine is made possible through a REFORMA Noche de Cuentos mini-grant awarded to Fairfield Bellarmine Research and Learning Librarian Ivelisse Maldonado. REFORMA is a national association that promotes library and information services to Latinos and Spanish-speaking populations. With a belief that storytelling and oral traditions are key to the transmission and preservation of culture, Noche de Cuentos was launched in 2010 to promote and preserve the art of storytelling within Latino communities in the U.S.

Free and open to the public, the alumna author event with Victoria Buitron will take place at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 1 in St. Ambrose Hall on Bellarmine Campus, located at 460 Mill Hill Ave. in Bridgeport, Conn.