Puerto Rican diasporic writers. Centro presents book reviews by Carmen Haydée Rivera.
Carmen Haydée Rivera
Centro Journal, Vol. 34, Iss. 1, (Spring 2022): 265-268.
Poets Philosophers Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is one of the most multifaceted and innovative diasporic Puerto Rican writers of the past decades. Her literary works, published in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, and translated into various languages have revolutionized Puerto Rican Literature, both on and off the island. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Braschi’s creative and intellectual world extends far beyond geographic, linguistic, historical, and cultural boundaries to embrace another dimension of the tangible and the imagined in her efforts to form part of a literary tradition that she constantly renews and reinvents.
Braschi moved on to hybrid narrative experimentation, developed through the juxtaposition of genres (fiction, poetry, drama) and languages (Spanish and English) that defy and problematize narratological categorization in her work titled Yo-Yo Boing!, published by Latin American Literary Review in 1998. She later followed up with a publication full of multiple narrative voices and characters that traverse historical eras and literary movements in an attempt to unravel life’s significance within a transnational lens and postmodern perspective in United States of Banana (2011). In the same year of this publication, Amazon Crossing for World Literature also issued a collected works version of Braschi’s writing that included Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana. In 2021, a version of United States of…
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Diasporic Puerto Rican Literature
Diasporic Literary Scholar
Carmen Haydée Rivera Vega is a professor in the Department of English, College of Humanities, at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature, with an emphasis on Multiethnic Literatures of the United States, from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Her teaching and research interests include Diasporic Puerto Rican Writers in the US, Contemporary US Latinx Literature, Literature of Caribbean Migration, and Women’s Studies. She has served as Interim Chair, ESL Coordinator, and Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department of English, College of Humanities; Dean of Academic Affairs in the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research; and Dean of Academic Affairs and Interim Chancellor for the UPR-Rio Piedras campus. Her publications include two co-edited collections of essays, Writing Off the Hyphen: New Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2008) and Cuba and Puerto Rico: Transdisciplinary Approaches to History, Literature, and Culture (University of Florida Press, 2023). She is also the author of a critical biography on Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros (Praeger Press, 2009) and a collection of interviews, Diasporic Journeys: Interviews with Puerto Rican Writers in the United States (CENTRO Press, 2023). Additional critical articles under her authorship appear in journals such as The Ethnic Studies Review; CENTRO Journal; New West Indian Guide; Latino/a Research Review; Caribbean Studies; Camino Real – Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas; Op-Cit – Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas; Revista Umbral; El Sol – Revista de la Asociación de Maestros de PR, and Sargasso – A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture, among others. Dr. Rivera Vega is currently working on an anthology of contemporary diasporic Puerto Rican writers and also a collection of writings (essays, poetry, short stories) on the theme of return migration to Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican Diaspora Books:
- Puerto Rican Diaspora Book Review of Poets Philosophers Lovers.
- Diasporic Journeys: Interviews with Puerto Rican Writers in the United States
- Diapora Literature.
- Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives
- Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook
- Insular Interventions: Diasporic Puerto Rican Literature Bilanguaging Toward a Greater Puerto Rico
- Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican
Keywords: Writing off the Hyphen, Nuyorican Literature, Boricua writers, Postcolonial literature, Caribbean epic poems, Puerto Rican Writers in the US,