Iconic Puerto Rican Poet
Writing in Spanish, Spanglish, and English
“You’ve got something original there. You have it.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, on hearing the young Braschi recite her first poem
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, and philosopher whose groundbreaking, multi-genre books have changed what literature can do. Visionary and innovative, she dramatizes migration, empire, debt, and democracy with exuberant humor and unrelenting hope. She breaks the rules of genre, and of language itself, to imagine what freedom could look like.
“Cutting-edge, influential, and even revolutionary.”
— Library of Congress
“One of the most revolutionary voices in Latin American literature today.”
— PEN America
Epic Works
Empire of Dreams
- El imperio de los sueños. An epic in six books of poetry, written in Spanish in 1980s New York, where poetry cross-dresses as love letter, TV commercial, diary, novel, musical, and manifesto. Clowns, shepherds, magicians, madmen, witches, and artists unleash their fantasies in the streets, turning the city into a site of liberation for the multitudes. Poet Alicia Ostriker calls Empire of Dreams “a masterpiece” and Braschi “an accomplished cosmopolitan heiress to the traditions of Lorca, Neruda, Mistral, and Márquez.”
Yo-Yo Boing!
- Yo-Yo Boing! Hailed as the first Spanglish novel, Yo-Yo Boing! lets dramatic voices switch between English and Spanish in mid-sentence, turning conversation into performance. Literary critic Jean Franco praised Braschi’s “extraordinary virtuosity” and called Yo-Yo Boing! “a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and everyday life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.”
United States of Banana
- United States of Banana transforms Ground Zero into a stage for the unraveling of American empire and a reckoning with Puerto Rico’s colonial status. In a genre-bending work of philosophical fiction and poetic theater, Braschi sets Hamlet, Zarathustra, Giannina, and Segismundo moving from post-9/11 ruin toward revolution, freedom, and a world beyond borders. Cultural theorist Hamid Dabashi calls United States of Banana “one of the most brilliant postcolonial works of fiction” of the post-9/11 era.
PUTINOIKA
- PUTINOIKA is an epic tragicomedy of pollution, collusion, and delusion in the Putin–Trump era. Inspired by Greek tragedy, it unfolds in three parts, Palinode, Bacchae, and Putinoika, as Braschi turns the grotesque spectacle of contemporary power into a wild ride through art, politics, and myth. “PUTINOIKA is the best thing that Trump ever gave us,” said Carmen Boullosa. “This powerful, funny, profound, wise, crazed book is a wild ride. It is a bomb (a poem?, a novel?, a play?, fiction? essay?, comedy?, drama? all of the above?). It is a meditation on poetry, art, the pandemia, politics, Trump, his wall, the Putinas, the author, Puerto Rico, Oedipus, and Baudelaire. I laughed to tears here and there while the book displays one of the cruelest portraits of our times. Bravo, Giannina!”
“Braschi is a literary genre in herself.”
— Elidio La Torre Lagares
Where to begin
New to Giannina Braschi? Start with Empire of Dreams, a love letter to New York, or United States of Banana, her first book in English.
Teaching or studying literature, philosophy, or cultural studies? Braschi’s books sit on syllabi beside Dante, Sophocles, Margaret Atwood, Roberto Bolaño, and Julia de Burgos. Start with the critical anthology Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi and the teaching guides on the blog.
Writing about Braschi? Read her biography, honors, and recent interviews, or get in touch through Contact.
Creating art of your own? Braschi’s work keeps sparking new creations across many disciplines. Composers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and designers have turned it into a graphic novel, an art song cycle, a play, sculpture, film, and even a kinetic Giannina Chair that turns into a lamp. See Poetry on Film.
Thinking about law and liberty? United States of Banana asks readers “to rethink what we mean by freedom, what we regard as a right, and what we understand by sovereign power,” as Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús writes.
Her Story
Before Giannina Braschi was a writer, she was a tennis champion, a teen model, and a founding member of the Children’s Choir of San Juan. She studied in Madrid, Florence, London, and Rouen, earned a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and taught Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, and Lorca at Rutgers, Colgate, and the City University of New York. Then, in 1986, she turned the full force of her imagination to her own writing, forging, in her words, “a new language—a new way of looking at the world that has not yet been voiced or recognized.” An advocate for Puerto Rican independence, she writes to decolonize the mind, and she believes liberty is a human right.
Literary Honors and Awards
Giannina Braschi’s honors span both sides of the Atlantic. The North American Academy of the Spanish Language granted her the Enrique Anderson Imbert National Award, citing a career “which extends from groundbreaking research on Hispanic classics to her spectacular work as a renowned and award-winning creator” and placing her “among the most innovative and influential voices of Hispanic letters in the United States.” In Spain, she received the Cambio16 Prize (Madrid) for creating a literature of hope, and was the first woman ever to receive the Fray Luis de León Medal for Ibero-American Poetry (Salamanca). The American Studies Association recognized Braschi’s lifework with the Angela Y. Davis Award, and the City of San Juan honored her for her global impact on Puerto Rican culture. Her work has also been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, Rutgers University, and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.
A Literature of Hope
Giannina Braschi invents literary forms that hold a full range of human feeling and the contradictions of political and cultural life. Her books move from erotic play and intimate tenderness to collective rage and sorrow, from absurd comedy to wonder and hard-won hope. Bringing poetry, fiction, drama, philosophy, musical, and manifesto into startling new combinations, she makes Spanish, Spanglish, and English living forces for thought, feeling, and freedom.
“In Giannina Braschi’s churning imagination, in her exuberant, upwelling, hilarious and mortifying performances of wonderment, howl, synchronic time, ethical insistence, and linguistic swirl, it’s not unusual to find words such as ‘generosity’ and ‘spirit’ leading, in the same sentence, to ‘welfare,’ ‘radiation,’ and ‘tax deductions.’ If, as in Ezra Pound’s translation of Aristotle, the ‘swift perception of relations’ is truly the ‘hallmark of genius,’ it’s in the brightly lit halls of Braschi’s books where poetry is tested and stamped with such a mark. Like her character, Frenzy, she’s a provocateur who believes in and pledges her fidelity only to ‘everything that exists.’”
— Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
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