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Guillermo Reyes 

Guillermo Reyes is a writer who was born in 1962, in the small town of Mulchen, Chile, in the southern part of the country. He grew up in Santiago, Chile until his mother and he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, later to Arlington, Virginia, and moved yet again to Los Angeles, CA where he went to high school in the late 1970s. Guillermo’s childhood was turned into a book called Madre and I:  A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives (published by University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). The book narrates an entire family history from his early years in Chile to living in Maryland, Virginia, then in California. Each of those places left an indelible mark on him. His heritage is mixed, mostly Spanish and some Indian, most likely the Mapuche Indians of southern Chile. Guillermo got his master’s degree in Playwriting from UC-San Diego. He also spent a year in Padua, Italy learning Italian through the Education Abroad Program of UCLA. Spanish is his native language, English his second language, and Italian and French are third and fourth. The writer feels more comfortable writing his stories in English because, while he can write Spanish formally, he doesn’t the have practice of writing creatively in Spanish. Reyes started to write as a “genetic urgency.” Guillermo is a professor of dramatic writing, so he writes and also teaches writing.

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