Award-winning author Cori Cliff returns to her hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, promoting El Cíclope (a novella that blurs memoir and fiction). As public readings unfold, the audience is pulled backward into Cori’s teenage years, when she was known as Courtney Cliff, a homecoming queen navigating love, isolation, and the quiet violence of belonging.

The narrative traces Courtney’s relationships with two young men: Sean, her high-school boyfriend, and Mateo, her Spanish tutor ( a first-generation Mexican-American foster youth living on the margins of the same town that celebrates her). As memory fractures and rewrites itself, the play exposes how storytelling becomes both refuge and weapon.

El Cíclope draws structural and thematic inspiration from Latin American folklore, using myth as a lens through which memory, transformation, and authorship are examined, rather than as a literal retelling of a specific tale. The work engages bilingual storytelling and questions of cultural proximity, asking audiences to consider not only what stories are told, but who tells them and why.

Designed for intimate spaces, the play invites conversation around identity, class, race, authorship, and the ethics of representation in contemporary American storytelling.

Author’s Note on Cultural Context:
El Cíclope is written from an outside perspective and engages Latin American folklore as metaphor and structure rather than cultural authority. The play was developed in collaboration with bilingual artists, and Spanish language elements were translated by Octavio Rodriguez. The role of Mateo must be played by a performer who identifies as Hispanic, and productions are encouraged to include cultural consultants and bilingual collaborators as part of the rehearsal process.