MAYRA SANTOS-FEBRES is an Afro-Puerto Rican storyteller and poet born in Carolina, on Puerto Rico’s northeast coast. She has been awarded international Guggenheim, Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and prizes including the Juan Rulfo from Radio France Internationale, the Letras de Oro from Spain, the Novel Prize from the Puerto Rican Literature Institute, and the Primavera Novel Prize. She is the creator of the creative writing program at the University of Puerto Rico, as well as the founder and director of the Festival de la Palabra (2009-2018) and the #Quenoseacabenlaspalabras program. In 2016, she founded the Las Ancestras Women Writers Collective, which offers creative writing workshops in women’s prisons, girls’ and adolescents’ shelters, and supports memory and writing projects. In 2023, she became the principal investigator of the Research Center for Studies in Afro-Descendancy and Racialization and the Virtual Afro Archive, and in 2026 became the writer in residence of the University of Puerto Rico in recognition of her literary achievements. She has taught at Harvard, Complutense University, University of Houston, Rutgers, Baltimore, and the Autonomous University of Yucatán, among others. Her works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Romanian.
