Giannina Braschi is the author of the postmodern poetry epic Empire of Dreams, the Spanglish classic novel Yo-Yo Boing! and the drama United States of Banana. She has been called “one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin American literature” by PEN and the United States Library of Congress. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish and English to explore the cultural and linguistic journey of millions of Latin American immigrants in the United States.
She holds a Ph.D. in Golden Age Spanish Literature from the State University of New York. She was a professor at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University where she was Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing. She published a book on the Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, César Vallejo, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Federico García Lorca. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, and PEN American Center. She was born in Puerto Rico and lives in New York City.
