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Cristina Rivera Garza: De-blading the Knife

Cristina Rivera Garza

De-blading the Knife
Writing Femicide in Mud

Translated by Sarah Booker

Softcover, 72 pages

Date of publication: 08.09.2026

DE

Writing Femicide in Mud

Inspired by a walrus-ivory Story Knife from the Arctic region, Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza creates a multi-faceted narration that asks: what is remembered? How? For whom? The ephemeral strokes of a Story Knife were traditionally drawn by young Yupik girls into soil or snow to repeat old tales that would then fade away. Rivera Garza connects this empowering ancient Indigenous practice to the violentometro, a contemporary tool designed in Mexico to measure instances of intimate partner violence. The story of violence against women constantly disappears even as it is continuously told, re-told. Might a Story Knife play a role in reversing such erasure?

  • archaeology
  • gender
  • body
  • violence
  • feminism

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English

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English

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros, Mexico. She is a writer, translator, critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Pulitzer Prize Memoir 2024. Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country was shortlisted for the 2021 NBCC Awards in criticism. The Taiga Syndrome won the Shirley Jackson Award 2018. Recent awards include: Jose Donoso International Literary Award, Chile 2021; Alfonso Reyes Nuevo León international Literary Award, Mexico 2021, among others. She is Hugh Rot and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies.
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