Bios
Mayra Santos-Febres
Mayra Santos-Febres was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1966. She studied Literature at the University of Puerto Rico and has two graduate degrees from Cornell University. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico in the Rio Piedras campus and is a member of the International and Multicultural Institute of the University of Puerto Rico. She has obtained, among other prizes, the Letras de Oro and the Juan Rulfo prize, both in the story genre, and she was a finalist for the Premio Primavera in 2017 for
Nuestra Señora de la Noche. She was awarded the John S. Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 2017 and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency in 2018. Her works have been translated into French, English, German, Croatian, Korean, Icelandic, and Italian. She is the author of poetry books,
Anamú y manigua (1990),
El orden escapado (1991),
Boat People (1994),
Tercer Mundo Lecciones de renuncia (2014-20),
Huracanada (2018); and of the collection of short stories,
Pez de vidrio y otros cuentos, El cuerpo correcto, Un pasado posible and
Mujeres violentas. Additionally, she has published the novels
Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2001),
Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (2002),
Fe en disfraz, Nuestra Señora de la noche and
La amante de Gardel, Sobre piel y papel, and the essay,
Tratado de Medicina Natural para Hombres Melancólicos. In 2019, she won the National Prize for Literature from the Académie de Pharmacie in Paris, France for her novel,
La amante de Gardel.
Macarena Gómez-Barris
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar. She is author of three books including,
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism.
Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and activisms in troubled times. She is also author of
Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of
Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is working on a new book,
At the Sea's Edge (Duke University Press). Macarena is the Founding Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute,
www.globalsouthcenter.org.
Edgar Garcia
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of
Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019);
Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020);
Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021); and
Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the department of Creative Writing.
Saudi Garcia
Saudi Garcia is an Afro-Caribbean, queer, first generation immigrant with a deep passion for justice and liberation for her home, the island of Ayiti (Dominican Republic and Haiti), its people and its diasporas. Grounded in an equity, abolitionist and healing ethic, she expresses that passion through my work in academia, racial equity facilitation, and film. Her deep concern with Black subjects' relationships to land, ecology and environmental health has led her to research the history, health impacts and contemporary forms of resistance to gold mining in the Dominican Republic and Haiti for her Ph.D. in Anthropology at New York University. Adopting a bio-social perspective that centers theories of racialization, toxicity, collective trauma, and links between human and non-human health and healing, her work is an entry point to examine how Black Caribbean communities construct alternative visions of human relations to the region's climate-vulnerable and toxic ecologies.