The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, also known as Larry La Fountain, was born in 1968 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds a BA in Hispanic studies from Harvard College, along with a year of coursework from the Universidade de São Paulo, and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Columbia University. La Fountain-Stokes is the author of the books Abolición del pato (Terranova Editores, 2013) and Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2009). His creative work has been published in anthologies such as Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood (New York Univ. Press, 1999), Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction (Painted Leaf Press, 1999), Antología de temática gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora (Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 2007), Antología del Colectivo Literario Homoerótica (Erizo Editorial, 2012), and Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories (Great Books Foundation, 2014). In 2008, La Fountain-Stokes was a finalist for the Bright Hill Literary Center Full-Length Poetry Book Competition for his manuscript Deseos, and in 2006, he won second place in the Pregones Theater’s Asuncion Playwrights Project Play Competition for the play entitled Uñas pintadas de azul, an extension of one of his short stories. His significant literary influences include Julia de Burgos, Luis Palés Matos, René Marqués, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, Mayra Santos Febres, Ángel Lozada, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, José Donoso, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca. Currently, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he’s a professor of Spanish, American Culture, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. 

Works Cited

La Fountain-Stokes, Larry. Author Questionnaire. The Puerto Rican Literature Project, 2024.

La Fountain-Stokes, Larry. Interview. Conducted by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, 24 Aug. 2022.