Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely considered one of the most innovative Latin American authors and is best known for his two masterpiece novels, Memórias Póstumas de Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro. He was also the founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (1896), a position he held throughout the rest of his life.
Karen C. Sherwood Sotelino (BA Stanford; MA, PhD UC Santa Cruz), born in San Francisco, California, has translated novels by Machado de Assis, Raduan Nassar and Raul Brandão. She has taught English, Portuguese and translation at Associação Alumni, São Paulo, and Stanford