The University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) will host writer Giannina Braschi, who will present the lecture “Crear un género” [Creating a Genre (and/or Gender!)] on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, at 10:30am in Chardón 121, UPR-M.
The moderator for this event will be Cora Monroe González (UPR-M) and the discussants will be Carmen Haydée Rivera Vega (UPR-RP) and Nicole Talavera Arbonies (UPR-M). [Many thanks to Linda Rodríguez Guglielmoni for bringing this item to our attention.]
About the author: PEN World Voices Festival named Giannina Braschi “one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin America today.”
She wrote the postmodern poetry classic Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994), and the Spanglish tour de force novel Yo-Yo Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998). The Associated Press praised Braschi’s explosive new book United States of Banana (Amazon Crossing, 2011) as a work of unlimited imagination and fearless language. Her new book Putinoika (Flowersong Press, 2024) dramatizes frenzy and plague in the Trump and Putin era as an epic tragicomedy. Writing in Spanish, Spanglish, and English, Braschi explores the cultural and linguistic journey of millions of Hispanic immigrants to the USA and challenges the three politic options of her native Puerto Rico—Nation, Colony or State.
Braschi was a singer, tennis champion, and fashion model during her teen years in San Juan, before discovering literature as her calling. With a Ph.D. in Golden Age Spanish Literature from the State University of New York-Stony Brook, she has written books and essays on the great Spanish poets Cervantes, Becquer, Garcilaso, Lorca, and Machado. She has won grant and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, InterAmericas, Reed Foundations, Rutgers University, Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, and PEN American Center. She has also served as judge for the PEN book awards. Her collected poetry in English translation inaugurated the Yale Library of World Literature.
The Puerto Rican author is the subject of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, an anthology edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer, with a preface by Ilan Stavans (University of Pittsburgh Press). This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, celebrates Braschi as one of the most original and influential Latinx philosophers and poets in a generation. Since the 1980s, her linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and humor have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word. [. . .]
Read more at https://gianninabraschi.com/home/
For more on the writer and her publications, visit https://gianninabraschi.com/
The University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) will host writer Giannina Braschi, who will present the lecture “Crear un género” [Creating a Genre (and/or Gender!)] on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, at 10:30am in Chardón 121, UPR-M. The moderator for this event will be Cora Monroe González (UPR-M) and the discussants will be Carmen Haydée Rivera Vega
