Conversation & Reading

Boat People: A Conversation with Mayra Santos-Febres and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

Tue, Oct 10, 2023

6:30 PM–7:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below.

Watch the video of this conversation here or below:

Join us for an online conversation with author Mayra Santos-Febres, and translator Vanessa Pérez-Rosario of the award-winning poetry collection Boat People(Cardboard House Press, 2021). They will discuss the inspiration for the book and the themes of immigration and belonging that are explored in the book.

Click here to Register for this online conversation via Zoom hosted by our friends and collaborators afrolatin@ forum.

About the Speakers:

Mayra Santos-Febres was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico 1966. She studied literature at the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph. D. at Cornell University. She has been a visiting scholar at Rutgers (1992), Cornell (1994) and Harvard University (2004) as well as Complutense University in Spain (2013), Autonomous University of México, at Yucatán campus (2008) and Leipzing University in Holland (2005). She co-created the Creative Writing Program for the University of Puerto Rico, and founded and directed The Word/ Festival de la Palabra, the most internationally recognized Literary Festival in Puerto Rico (2010-2009) . Content Coordinator of Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Institute at the UPR, Mayra Santos-Febres in currently the Principal Investigator for the development of University of Puerto Rico’s Afro Diasporic and Race Studies Program, which has been recently awarded with a Mellon Foundation grant for academic diversification.

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is a translator and professor of English at Queens College and professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014) published in Spanish as Julia de Burgos: lac reación de un ícono puertorriqueño (2022) is a finalist for the International Latino Book Award 2023. She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010) and translator of Boat People (2021) by Mayra Santos-Febres, which received honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award 2023. She is currently working on a bilingual critical edition titled “I Am My Own Path: The Writings of Julia de Burgos” (University of Texas Press, 2024). She is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

This event is organized and sponsored by afrolatin@ forum and is co-sponsored byThe Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, Small Axe, Cafe con Libros, Proyecto de Diversificación Académica en Estudios de Afrodescendencia y Racialización, UPR, Cumbre Afro, and La Casa de Las Américas, LGCC.