THE WRITERS

MARIVELL CONTRERAS is a past president of the Asociación de Cronistas de Arte de la República Dominicana. With a degree in social communication, she has published and edited content for various  newspapers and magazines. She is chief editor of Enterato.com and works at TV Dominicana. Her stories have been anthologized in Narrativa contemporánea de Monte Plata, Cuentos del beisbol, and Meter un ¡goool! She has also published three poetry collections: Mujer ante el espejo, Hija de la tormenta, and El silencio de abril. Other publications include Feria de palabras, La chica de la Sarasota: Cuentos de la calle, La flotadora, and El sabor de las letras.
KERSY CORPORAN has been writing poetry and short stories since she was a teenager. Her love of literature and writing led her to attend Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she earned her MA in English education. She has led workshops in teaching writing, culturally responsive teaching, and issues of social justice. Kersy especially enjoys helping teens tell their stories and currently teaches high school in northern New Jersey, where she resides with her husband and daughter.
ANGIE CRUZ is the author of two novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee. She has published short fiction and essays in magazines and journals including Callaloo, the New York Times, and Kweli. She has received numerous grants and residencies, including the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, the Camargo Fellowship, Yaddo, and the Macdowell Colony. She is one of the founding members of the National Book Foundation’s BookUp program and editor of www.asterixjournal.com. She was recently awarded the Elizabeth K. Doenges Visiting Artist/Scholar Fellowship from Mary Baldwin College. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and is at work on her third novel.
RHINA P. ESPAILLAT has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, as well as translations from and into Spanish. She has earned numerous awards, national and international. Her most recent publications are a poetry collection in English titled Her Place in These Designs, and two books of Spanish translations, Oscura fruta/Dark Berries: Forty-Two Poems by Richard Wilbur and Algo hay que no es amigo de los muros/Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall: Forty Poems by Robert Frost.
DELTA EUSEBIO was born under the sign of Aquarius. She likes children, animals, and home-cooked meals. She also likes storytelling, reading, and dreaming. She studied education and got a master’s in social education and sociocultural presentation because she didn’t like her own elementary and middle school. She teaches and tries to make sure the students don’t get bored. She studied personal development in Chile and creative writing in Argentina and received a masters in art therapy from the Instituto de Arte Terapia Analítica Integrativa de Madrid. She says that when she writes and does art therapy, she’s soul making.
NORIS EUSEBIO-POL studied sociology at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, where she also taught. She did postgraduate studies in rural sociology at the Latin American Commission for Social Sciences and in massage therapy and stress management in Baltimore, Maryland. Her teaching experience also includes the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo. She has done considerable research on rural organizing and struggles. Her articles appear in the book Movimientos sociales del Caribe, the journals Ciencia y Sociedad and Estudios Sociales, and national newspapers, and at www.cavernacristalina.blogspot.com. For many years she was part of the team for the radio program Matutino Alternativo. She’s currently the director of Editorial Funglode.
YALITZA FERRERAS was a 2014–15 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she won the Delbanco Thesis Prize. Her writing appears in the Colorado Review and Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
CAROLINA GONZÁLEZ is a writer and teacher who has worked in academia, media, and the arts for the past two decades. As a journalist, she has covered education, immigration, politics, music, and Latino culture in various alternative and mainstream media outlets. The guidebook she coauthored with Seth Kugel, Nueva York: The Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs, was published in 2006. Currently she works in communications for the union 32BJ SEIU, continues to work independently on radio projects, and teaches at the Milano School for International Affairs at The New School. Her essay was written in 2007; Milena is now nine years old.
FARAH HALLAL was born in Salcedo, Dominican Republic. She is a poet, prose writer, cultural activist, publicist, and promoter of reading and writing. She has published three books of poetry: Sol infinito (1994), which won first prize at the VI Feria Científico-Cultural at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña; Una mujer en caracol (2009); and Borrándome (2013). Under the Alfaguara Infantil imprint she published Sábado de ranas, which won the Premio Nacional de Literatura Infanto-Juvenil Aurora Tavárez Belliard. Her children’s novel Un adiós para mamá was awarded the Premio El Barco de Vapor 2013. In 2015 she published the children’s story Las gallinas son eléctricas.
ÁNGELA HERNÁNDEZ is a writer and poet whose work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Icelandic, Bengali, and Norwegian and included in anthologies in the United States and Europe. She won the Cole Prize for the Novel in 2002 for Mudanza de los sentidos; the National Story Prize, given by the Secretary of State and Education in the Dominican Republic, in 1997 for “Piedra de sacrificio”; the National Poetry Prize, given by the Secretary of Culture, in 2005 for Alicornio; and the National Story Prize, given by the Ministry of Culture, in 2012 for “La secta del crisantemo.” She is a corresponding member of the Academia Dominicana de Lengua.
ANA-MAURINE LARA is a national award-winning novelist and poet. She is the author of Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (2011), translated by Emilia María Durán Almarza, and Watermarks and Tree Rings (2011). Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. In  2013 she guest-edited a special edition of Aster(ix) Journal, “Ra(i)ces: Black Feminist Encounters.” She received her BA from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. Currently Ana-Maurine is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon.
ERIKA M. MARTÍNEZ, recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Hedgebrook Writing Residency, holds an MFA in English and creative writing from Mills College. Her writing has been adapted for the stage and has been featured in the anthologies Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education, Homelands: Women’s Journeys across Race, Place, and Time, and Second Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology. Her work has also appeared in Muthamagazine.com, Consequence magazine, and the Afro-Hispanic Review. She has taught creative writing in the Dominican Republic and is the editor of the annual Middle & High School Voices for the National Writing Project in New Hampshire.
MIRIAM MEJÍA, a Dominican writer living in New York, studied statistics and sociology at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. She has published Crisálida (1997), De fantasmas interiores y otras complejidades (2004), Garabatos en púrpura (2007), Piel de agua (2008), Aristas ancestrales (2010), Mujeres en claves (2010), and . . . y la imagen se hizo verso (2012). She also coedited La palabra rebelada/revelada: El poder de contarnos (2011). Her work appears in the anthologies Di aroma di café (2006), Antología de cuentistas dominicanas (2007), Voces de la inmigración: Historias y testimonios de mujeres inmigrantes dominicanas (2007), and Para no cansarles con el cuento (2015).
RIAMNY MÉNDEZ is a storyteller, in journalism and literature. She was a 2012–13 Fulbright Humphrey Fellow in Journalism and Gender Studies at the University of Maryland. In  2008 she won the Rafael Herrera Cabral Prize given by the Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE) for her work as coauthor of the series “Desarrollo Humano.” In 2009 she took second prize in the Fifth Annual Journalism Contest for Stories about Childhood and Adolescence, sponsored by UNICEF in the Dominican Republic. She coordinated the Dominican part of a research project titled “Responsibility and Transparency in Ibero-American Civil Society,” sponsored by a nonprofit alliance. She has a degree specializing in international relations from the Latin American Faculty in Social Sciences (FLACSO), a regional educational organization established through UNESCO.
JEANNETTE MILLER is a poet, prose writer, essayist, and art historian born in Santo Domingo. She has published four books of poetry, El viaje (1967), Fórmulas para combatir el miedo (1972), Fichas de identidad/Estadías (1985), and Polvo eres (2013); four story collections, Cuentos de mujeres (2004), A mí no me gustan los boleros (2009), El corazón de Juan (2012), and La verdadera historia de María Cristo 
(2015); and a novel, La vida es otra cosa (2006). Her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Portuguese. She has written for the newspapers El Caribe and Hoy. With a degree in letters from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, she was the third woman to receive the National Literature Prize in 2011.
SHEILLY NÚÑEZ was born in Santo Domingo and received her law degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santiago de los Caballeros, where she also participated in the literary group Ateneo Insular. She received various national literary prizes for prose between the ages of seventeen and twenty. In 2004 her book of stories, Los Elementos, was the winner of the Young People’s Story Contest at the Santo Domingo International Book Fair. She currently practices law but continues to write and wait for her writings to be published.
JINA ORTIZ received her graduate degree in creative writing at the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. She is the coeditor of All About Skin: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Women of Color (2014). Her poetry has appeared in publications including the Afro-Hispanic Review, Calabash, Green Mountains Review, Worcester Review, the Caribbean Writer, and Solstice Literary Magazine. She has received residency fellowships from organizations such as the Art Omi/Ledig House International Writers’ Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Can Serrat Residency in Barcelona, Spain, as well as grants from the Worcester Cultural Commission and the Highlights Foundation.
SOFIA QUINTERO, a self-proclaimed Ivy League homegirl, is a writer, activist, speaker, and producer. Her first three novels, written under the pen name Black Artemis, are included in the Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Literature. Quintero also writes “chick lit,” erotica, and young adult fiction under her real name. She has been featured in the New York Post, El Diario/La Prensa, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Latina, and Upscale. Kirkus called her latest novel, Show and Prove, “powerful and thought-provoking, an homage to a climactic hip-hop era.” To learn more about her and her various creative and political projects, visit www.sofiaquintero.com.
DULCE MARÍA REYES BONILLA was born in Santo Domingo and migrated to Brooklyn in 1989, then to Miami in 2011. She is a black global citizen and intersectional activist, nonfiction writer, translator, copyeditor, ma-level sociologist, and educator. Her English stems from “pollito:chicken,” In Tune, NYC worlds, and CUNY faculty. She has studied with the Center for Writing and Literature, VONA, ALP’s Tongues Afire, the New School, and IWWG. She has been published in Colorlines, 50 Ways to Support Lesbian and Gay Equality, Revista ABPN, the Gotham Gazette, Divagaciones bajo la luna, and Desde la Orilla. In 2001 she was named to El Diario’s “ 50 Mujeres Destacadas.”
LISSETTE ROJAS, a journalist with a literary vocation, loves to bring stories to life with her number 2 pencil. She uses her prose to draw out life around her, searching for meaning in the details. In 2009 she won first place in the Radio Santa María Story Contest with “La niñera y el grito.” In  2008 she received an honorable mention in the International Story Contest at Casa de Teatro for “En territorio de niños herejes” and in the Alianza Cibaeña Story Contest for “La mosca que haría temblar a Suiza y otros cuentos.”
NELLY ROSARIO was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BS in engineering from MIT and an MFA from Columbia University. She has received numerous awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award in Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. Rosario tells the story of generations of Dominican women in her debut novel Song of the Water Saints, which won a PEN Open Book Award in 2002. Rosario has served on the MFA Program faculty at Texas State University and is currently assistant director of writing for the Blacks at MIT History Project.
LUDIN SANTANA was born with a missionary soul in San Pedro de Macorís. She’s considered herself a poet ever since she can remember but has had the opportunity to venture into stories, eventually being named a finalist in various national contests, including an honorable mention in the Feria Científico-Cultural at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in 1997 for “Rosalia.” She has a degree in marketing and a master’s in management from the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, which has allowed her to work in the pension and insurance sectors, a social ministry that complements her writerly vocation.
SHEREZADA (CHIQUI) VICIOSO was born in Santo Domingo. She has a degree in sociology and Latin American history from the City University of New York (Brooklyn College). She earned a master’s in educational programming design at Columbia University and studied cultural project management at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has written and edited content for various newspapers. She received the Caonabo de Oro prize in 1988, the Gold Medal for the Most Distinguished Woman of the Year in 1992, and the National Theater Award in 1997 for her play, Wish-ky Sour. She is the author of five poetry collections, eight plays, and a collection of essays. Currently she is working on a screenplay.
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