The Song Of The Written Word

Sharing selections from her Illusian Sequence, a series of genre-hopping speculative novels, tonight’s PoemAlley guest reader, C.A. Rodriguez, has been writing poetry, fiction and plays for numerous years and has translated two Golden Age Spanish plays considered major analogues of "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Duchess of Malfi". After a quarter of a century, both translations, along with her ground-breaking comparative analyses, are still in print.

While sharing a common thematic thread, each of Rodriguez’s books can be read independently and are shaped by the different concentrations in the author’s studies in English and Comparative Literature, for which she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. 

For fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, or the currently popular Wicked Years series by Gregory Maguire, Rashingor (2007), the first Illusian entry, is of particular appeal, as it involves three sisters in a fairytale setting, in a plot described as a feminist challenge to Cinderella.

Besides her scholarship in Renaissance/Baroque drama and the epic/romance tradition,  Rodriguez’s studies in the nineteenth century novel also find expression in Volume II, St. Peter’s Wood (2007), which  combines a more subtle magic realism with the mood and character struggles of the British rural novel of the same century.

An accomplished artist as
well as writer, Rodriguez also
designs many of the covers
of her novels

As with her other fiction, her most recent effort, 2011's The Street of Secrets, is published through her own imprint, March House Press (carodriguez.com). You can contact Dr. Rodriguez at cynthia@carodriguez.com. Click on the titles below to look further into her acclaimed translations of Lope de Vega’s Renaissance plays “Castelvins andMonteses” and “The Duchess of Amalfi’s Steward”.