Join us and The 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 for a conversation with Mayra Santos-Febres, author, and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, translator, 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. Join us!

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: la

c 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.