LITERATURE + LECTURES

Blue Willow Bookshop presents a book signing and discussion by C.M. Mayo.   C.M. Mayo joins us to discuss and sign her latest book, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

Who knew that Mexico once had a half-American prince? Or that this little boy’s future was hotly debated not just in Mexico but in Washington D.C. and in every court in Europe? Set in the mid-19th century when Maximilian von Habsburg was Emperor of Mexico, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is based on the true and never before completely told story about the little boy who, as in a fairytale, became a prince— and a pawn in the struggle-to-the-death over Mexico's destiny.

A fairytale based on the true but never before completely told story— the work of seven years of travel and research in archives as far flung as Vienna, Washington DC, and Mexico City— it begins, as it must, with, "Once upon a time..."

C.M. Mayo is the author of the novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, as well as the widely-lauded travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Founding editor of Tameme, the bilingual Spanish/English) chapbook press, Mayo is also a translator of contemporary Mexican poetry and fiction. Her anthology of Mexican fiction in translation, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion, was published by Whereabouts Press in March 2006.

Mayo's stories, essays and poems have appeared in numerous U.S. literary magazines including Chelsea, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Tin House and Witness, as well as the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. To read some of her work on-line, please click here. To read more about her audio-CD, "The Essential Francisco Sosa or, Picadou's Mexico City" click here.

Other awards include three Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards and three Washington Independent Writers Awards, most recently for her essay, "From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion." She has also been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and (for Sky Over El Nido) fellowships from the writers conferences at Wesleyan, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf.

She also blogs on books, creative writing, lit-blogging, and other subjects on her blog, "Madam Mayo".

A Texas native raised in Northern California and a long-time resident of Mexico City, Mayo was educated as an economist at the University of Chicago. She previously worked at a Mexico City investment bank and ITAM, a private university, where she taught international and development finance in both the undergraduate and the MBA programs. Click here for more about her career and publications as an economist.

Currently she divides her time between Mexico City, where she offers workshops via Dancing Chiva, and Washington DC, where she is on the faculty of The Writers Center .

Member, American Civil Liberties Union; Authors Guild; American Literary Translators Association; Maryland Writers Association; PEN; Womens National Book Association; The Writers Center.