Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, professor of literature, essayist, and literary critic and author of children's books. Her work focuses on themes of race, diaspora identity, female sexuality, gender fluidity, desire, and power. She is a cultural activist who helps to bring books to young readers and the less fortunate. Her writings have been translated into French, English, German, and Italian.
Esmeralda Santiago is a Puerto Rican author known for her narrative memoirs and trans-cultural writing. Her impact extends beyond cultivating narratives as she paves the way for more coming-of-age stories about being a Latina in the United States, alongside navigating cultural dissonance through acculturation.
Antonia Pantoja, was a Puerto Rican educator, social worker, feminist, civil rights leader and the founder of ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Forum, Boricua College and Producir. In 1996, she was the first Puerto Rican woman to receive the American Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lolita Lebrón was a Puerto Rican nationalist who was convicted of aggravated assault and other crimes after carrying out an armed attack on the United States Capitol in 1954, which resulted in the wounding of five members of the United States Congress. She was released from prison in 1979 after being granted clemency by President Jimmy Carter. Lebrón was born and raised in Lares, Puerto Rico, where she joined the Puerto Rican Liberal Party. In her youth she met Francisco Matos Paoli, a Puerto Rican poet, with whom she had a relationship. In 1941, Lebrón migrated to New York City, where she joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, gaining influence within the party's leadership.
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Asunción "Sunny" Cummings Hostin is an American lawyer, author, and television host. Hostin is co-host on ABC's morning talk show The View, for which she received nominations for Daytime Emmy Awards, as well as the Senior Legal Correspondent and Analyst for ABC News. She was also the host and executive producer of Investigation Discovery's true crime series Truth About Murder with Sunny Hostin.
Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best known Nuyorican writers, born in the United States to Puerto Rican parents. In 1973, she became the first Nuyorican woman in the 20th century to have her literary works published by the major commercial publishing houses, and has had the longest creative writing career of any Nuyorican female writer for these publishing houses. She centers her works on the female experience as a child and adult in Puerto Rican communities in New York City, with much of writing containing semi-autobiographical content. In addition to her prominent novels and short stories, she has written screenplays, plays, and television scripts.
The Ladies’ Gallery is a memoir that tells the stories of three women: the author Irene Vilar, her mother Gladys Méndez, and her grandmother the Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón. The memoir was translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa and has only been published in English. It was first published by Pantheon Books in 1996 as A Message From God in the Atomic Age and then by Vintage in 1998 as The Ladies’ Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets. The work was nominated for the 1999 Mind Book of the Year Award.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, writer, and scholar. Her work is focused on a comparative exploration of coloniality, primarily in Puerto Rico and the United States, with special attention given to the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and politics. She is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in New York City. She has also contributed to the Huffington Post, El Diario/La Prensa, and 80 Grados, and since 2008 has served as a Global Expert for the United Nations Rapid Response Media Mechanism. She is one of the best-known Puerto Rican lesbian artists currently living in the United States.
Impossible Motherhood is a memoir by Irene Vilar. It is the second memoir published by Vilar, the first being The Ladies’ Gallery.
Abraham Rodriguez Jr. is a Puerto Rican novelist, short story author and musician who writes in English about the experience of Latinos in the United States. Although he has been living in Germany since the mid-90s, Rodriguez continues to set his stories in the South Bronx. He is part of the Nuyorican Movement.
Leila Cobo is a Colombian journalist, writer, novelist, pianist and television show host. She is noted for her coverage of Latin music for Billboard where she is currently the Chief Content Officer for Latin Music and Español, overseeing the brand's coverage and development of Latin music across all its platforms. These include billboard.com and billboardespanol.com, which Cobo launched, podcasts and video. Cobo also programs the annual Billboard Latin Music Week, widely regarded as the premiere gathering for the Latin industry, where she has hosted guests like Shakira, Romeo Santos, Peso Pluma and Carlos Santana.
Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) is a postmodern novel in English, Spanish, and Spanglish by Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. The cross-genre work is a structural hybrid of poetry, political philosophy, musical, manifesto, treatise, memoir, and drama. The work addresses tensions between Anglo-American and Hispanic-American cultures in the United States.
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, which was favorably reviewed by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Kirkus Reviews, and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Jimenez was also named a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards and won Best Latino Book of 2019 by NBC News.
