Covering the literature of Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela).

Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, gives succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history.

Ann E. De León is a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, where she has taught since 2007. Her research specializes in Colonial Latin America, Mexico, Nahuatl language and literature, Aztec culture, and popular culture, with a strong focus on textual and pictorial traditions from the early colonial period.

Odile Cisneros is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. She co-edited Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos (2007), and she is also an active literary translator and has published book-length translations of work by Régis Bonvicino, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Jaroslav Seifert.

Richard Young is professor emeritus of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he taught for almost 40 years. His edited volumes include Latin American Postmodernisms (1997), Music, Popular Culture, Identities (2002), and, in collaboration with Stephen Hart, Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies (2003). He was editor of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos from 1996 until 2003.