Born in El Salvador, Dr. Beatriz Cortez migrated to the United States in November 1989. She obtained a Ph.D. In Latin American Literature from Arizona State University (1999). She specializes in contemporary Central American literatures and cultures from the perspective of gender, identity, and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous articles on postwar Central American literature and culture, exile, the construction of identity, and gender. She has also translated a number of literary and academic texts from Spanish into English. Her book Aesthetics of Cynicism: Post-War Central American Fiction was published in July 2010 by F&G Editores in Guatemala. She is co-author of the reader Introduction to Central American Studies, published by Kendall Hunt in 2008. She is co-editor of the third volume of the collection "Towards the History of Central American Literature" titled Per-Versions of Modernity: Literatures, Identities, and Displacements, published by F&G Editors in Guatemala in 2012 . She co-edited a special issue of Revista Iberoamericana on Contemporary Central American Literature and Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pittsburgh in 2013.