Puerto Rico in American Stories: A Reading Road Trip
With celebrated Puerto Rican writers Mayra Santos-Febres, Mara Pastor, Giannina Braschi, and Willie Perdomo
Premiere: September 17, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. ET
PBS Books and the Library of Congress travel to Puerto Rico in American Stories: A Reading Road Trip, exploring the Puerto Rican writers, books, libraries, bookstores, archives, and theaters that have shaped the island’s cultural life. The episode traces Puerto Rican literature across generations, genres, languages, and borders.
Watch the premiere on the PBS Books YouTube channel, the PBS Books Facebook page, the PBS app, or PBS.org. Visit the official episode page for program information.
Puerto Rico in American Stories: A Reading Road Trip
Produced by PBS Books in partnership with the Library of Congress Centers for the Book, American Stories: A Reading Road Trip explores the literary heritage of U.S. states and territories as part of the commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary. The Puerto Rico episode presents literature as a living journey through the island and its diaspora.
That journey begins with Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, whose La Cuarterona helped establish Puerto Rican theater and literature. It continues with Julia de Burgos, whose “Río Grande de Loíza” joins place, freedom, identity, and the force of the poetic self; Isabel Freire de Matos, whose Isla para los niños introduced generations of young readers to Puerto Rican history and culture; and René Marqués, whose La Carreta dramatized migration and social upheaval.
As Puerto Rican literature moved between the island and New York, Miguel Algarín helped establish the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a home for poetry grounded in voice, performance, culture, and community. That history opens onto the contemporary Puerto Rican writers featured by PBS Books: Mayra Santos-Febres, Mara Pastor, Giannina Braschi, and Willie Perdomo.
Four Puerto Rican Writers Across Island and Diaspora
Mayra Santos-Febres: Desire, History, and the Sea
PBS Books highlights Mayra Santos-Febres through Boat People, a work concerned with displacement and movement across the Caribbean. A poet, novelist, critic, and professor, Santos-Febres has created a prolific body of work alive to the sea, the body, race, desire, history, and the unequal forces that govern human lives.
Mara Pastor: Lyric Poetry, Memory, and Place
With Deuda natal, Mara Pastor brings lyrical intelligence to questions of memory and place. Her poetry finds pressure and surprise in the meeting of the intimate and the historical, the natural world, and family life.
Giannina Braschi: Creating a New American Language
PBS Books presents Giannina Braschi through Yo-Yo Boing!, her genre-defying novel written in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Braschi does more than move between languages: she creates a new American literary language capable of expressing culture and belonging as they are lived—in motion, contradiction, comedy, conflict, and constant translation.
In Yo-Yo Boing!, code-switching becomes music, dramatic structure, social reality, and intellectual argument. Characters move between languages while debating art, politics, race, class, immigration, identity, and Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States.
That linguistic freedom extends from the postmodern poetry epic Empire of Dreams to the geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana and the contemporary theater of Putinoika. Across these works, Braschi makes literary forms spacious enough for several languages, genres, and realities to coexist.
Explore Yo-Yo Boing! and Giannina Braschi’s Spanglish literature.
Willie Perdomo: Nuyorican Rhythms and Community
From New York, Willie Perdomo brings the rhythms, relationships, and experiences of Puerto Rican communities in the diaspora to the page. PBS Books features The Crazy Bunch, a book animated by friendship, neighborhood stories, music, masculinity, danger, loyalty, and loss.
Perdomo’s poetry carries the energy of spoken language and belongs to the Nuyorican tradition shaped by writers such as Miguel Algarín while possessing an unmistakable cadence of its own. Perdomo shows how Puerto Rican writing has transformed American poetry from within New York.
A Puerto Rican Literary Community in Motion
Santos-Febres, Pastor, Braschi, and Perdomo belong to a literary culture sustained through books, readings, classrooms, festivals, and acts of mutual recognition. Their connections cross the island and the diaspora without erasing the distinctions among their bodies of work.
The Whitney Museum’s intergenerational reading Our Bodies’ Beautiful Not Being, for example, brought Braschi, Pastor, and Perdomo together with a broad group of Puerto Rican poets. Such gatherings reveal Puerto Rican literature not as a procession of isolated names, but as an active and evolving conversation across generations, languages, and borders.
Explore contemporary Puerto Rican poetry and its leading voices.
Watch Puerto Rico | American Stories: A Reading Road Trip
The episode premieres September 17, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. ET on the PBS Books YouTube channel, PBS Books Facebook page, PBS app, and PBS.org.
After the premiere, this post will be updated with the archived episode.
Related Reading
- Puerto Rican Poetry
- Puerto Rican Novels: 23 Essential Books
- American Stories: A Reading Road Trip
- Giannina Braschi’s Biography
- Yo-Yo Boing!: Spanglish Literature and a New American Language
- Puerto Rican Poets at the Whitney Museum
Editorial note: This post was prepared by the site’s editorial team and is not written by Giannina Braschi. Program details and descriptions are based on materials from PBS Books and the Library of Congress. Last updated September 2026.