Two of Latin America’s most forceful dissident voices will explore the power and limits of fiction and other forms of creative expression in a public online conversation organized by Ithaca City of Asylum and co-hosted by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS).

Sergio Ramírez Mercado (born 1942) is Nicaragua’s best-known living writer. He has produced novels, short stories, and journalism and has won many international awards, including the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in the world of Spanish literature. He was also a key figure in the 1979 revolution that toppled the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. He served as vice president under the Sandinista government from 1985 to 1990 before splitting with the group and becoming a leading voice of opposition from the left. He was forced into exile in 2021 and was stripped of his citizenship in February 2023. He will be joining from Spain, where he now lives.

Ramírez will be joined in conversation by Pedro X. Molina, an internationally acclaimed political cartoonist who fled Nicaragua in 2018 and settled in Ithaca with the help of Ithaca City of Asylum. Molina has won a host of prestigious awards for his cartooning and his promotion of human rights, including the 2023 Vaclav Havel Award for Creative Dissent. He continues to contribute six cartoons and one strip per week to the online Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial, and his work is published regularly in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was an Artist Protection Fund fellow in residence at LACS.

Philip Lorenz, an associate professor of literature at Cornell, will moderate. The event is made possible by funds from the Statewide Community Regrants program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, and from Tompkins County, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.