Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy. Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965. In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants. Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)". Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'. His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e"). W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained. Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery. David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.

Primo Michele Levi (Italian: [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]) was a chemist and writer, the author of books, novels, short stories, essays, and poems. His unique 1975 work, The Periodic Table, linked to qualities of the elements, was named by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the best science book ever written. Levi spent eleven months imprisoned at Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (record number: 174,517) before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 18 January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The Primo Levi Center, dedicated "to studying the history and culture of Italian Jewry," was named in his honor.

Sylvia Molloy is an Argentine writer and critic who has taught at Princeton, Yale and NYU, from where she retired in 2010. At NYU she held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities. She is the author of two novels: En común olvido (2002). She has also written two short prose pieces, Varia imaginación (2003) and Desarticulaciones (2010). Her critical work includes La Diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle (1972), Las letras de Borges (1979), At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991), Poses de fin de siglo. Desbordes del género en la modernidad (2013), and edited volumes such as Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998) and Poéticas de la distancia. Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (2006). She has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has served as President of the Modern Language Association of America and of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana and holds an honorary degree in humane letters from Tulane University. In 2007 she created the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, with the collaboration of Lila Zemborain and Mariela Dreyfus. The MFA is the first program of its kind in the United States. It is modeled along the lines of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing in English, taking advantage as well of a similar, bilingual Program, at University of Texas at El Paso. Classes and workshops are taught in Spanish and students are mostly Spanish, Latin American or Latino.

Spanish colonial administrator Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored parts of present-day Florida, Texas, and Mexico and aroused interest in the region with his vivid stories of opportunities. In the New World, he and three other persons survived the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez of 1527. During eight years of traveling across the southwest, he traded and encountered and in faith healed various Native American tribes before he reconnected with forces in 1536. After returning in 1537, he wrote an account, first published in 1542 as La Relación ("The Relation", or in more modern terms "The Account"), retitled Naufragios ("Shipwrecks") in later editions. People ably consider and note Cabeza de Vaca as a proto-anthropologist for his detailed accounts of the many tribes of Native Americans. [Wikipedia]