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

About the Book: 

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. "Mayra Santos-Febres is one of our most powerful writers; and BOAT PEOPLE has long been a part of the poetic counter-tradition that shaped generations of Puerto Rican poets. Thanks to Vanessa Pérez-Rosario; English-language readers are now plunged into the depths of a text that; to echo Patrick Chamoiseau; is composed of 'that strange conference of poets and great beings;' lost at sea; tossed on shores; or caught in a world without return address or safe passage. Written like a border drawn on water; this oceanic book is both a source of life and a record of death. It remains as devastatingly urgent as the day it was written."--Raquel Salas Rivera

About the Author: 

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.

About the Conversation Partner:

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.