The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Mayra Santos-Febres was born in 1966 in Carolina, Puerto Rico. She is a writer, poet, professor, editor, storyteller, cultural worker, and organizer of the Festival de la Palabra. Santos-Febres started writing at a very young age, publishing her first poetry collection Anamú y manigua (La iguana dorada, 1991) at age 19, followed by El orden escapado (Editorial Tríptico, 1991) and Boat People (1994). Santos-Febres holds a BA in Hispanic studies from the University of Puerto Rico and an MA and PhD from Cornell University. Her short-story collections include El cuerpo correcto (R&R Editoras, 1998), Un pasado posible (2009), and Mujeres violentas (2011). She’s also published the novels Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Punto de Lectura, 2000 and Planeta, 2016), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (Punto de Lectura, 2002), Nuestra Señora de la noche (Espasa, 2006), Fe en disfraz (Alfaguara, 2009), and La amante de Gardel (Planeta, 2015), the latter having received the Primer Premio en Literatura of the Academie Nationale de la Pharmacie, Paris (2019). Santos-Febres is the author of the essay collections Sobre piel y papel (Ediciones Callejón, 2005) and Tratado de medicina natural para hombres melancólicos (Editorial Libros AC, 2009), the children’s book Aidara en el país de las nubes (Ediciones SM, 2016), and the crónica Jadeante y sudorosa (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2016). Her literary work has been translated into French, English, Italian, Romanian, Korean, Portuguese, and Icelandic. Other poetry collections of hers include Lecciones de renuncia (Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, 2021) and Huracanada (Trabalis Editores, 2018). She currently leads and is the Principal Investigator of the University of Puerto Rico’s Proyecto de Diversificación Académica en Afrodescendencia y Racialización.

Works Cited

López, Jotacé. “Mayra Santos-Febres: Affirming Blackness in the Caribbean and Latin America.” Latin American Literature Today, https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2022/09/mayra-santos-febres-affirming-afrodescendence-in-the-caribbean-and-latin-americ-by-jotace-lopez/.

“Mayra Santos-Febres.” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, https://www.gf.org/fellows/mayra-santos-febres/.

Santos-Febres, Mayra. Interview. Conducted by Ana Castillo Muñoz. El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, 2024.