Cafecito con Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. She attended the New York City public school system and received her academic degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Queens College, and City University of New York. As a child, she was sent to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women in her family, especially the older women. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Dahlma taught creative writing and language and literature in the New York City public school system before becoming a young-adult librarian. She has also taught creative writing to teenagers, adults, and senior citizens throughout New York while honing her own skills as a fiction writer and memoirist.

Keishla Rivera-Lopez is a writer, poet, and scholar. She received a PhD in American Studies at the Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. She was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of the diaspora in her scholarship and writing. Currently, she is a NEH postdoctoral research associate in American Studies at Montclair State University.