Giannina Braschi - Empire of Dreams

I only sing my song

to whomever follows me.

Photo Copyright: Michael Somoroff

Giannina Braschi is one of Puerto Rico’s most influential and versatile writers of poetry, fiction, and essays. She was a tennis champion, a singer, and fashion model during her teen years before discovering writing. She lived in Madrid, Paris, Rome, and London before settling in New York, where she taught at Colgate, Rutgers, and City University. With a PhD in Golden Age Spanish literature, she has written on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo, and Bécquer. Author of United States of Banana and Yo-Yo Boing! , Braschi’s cutting-edge work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY Foundation for the Arts, El Diario , PEN American Center, the Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and the Reed Foundation. She writes in three languages — Spanish, Spanglish, and English — to express the enculturation process of Hispanic immigrants — and to explore the three political options of Puerto Rico — nation, colony, or state. Braschi dedicates her life’s work to inspiring personal and political liberation.

Photo Copyright: John Stuart

Tess O’Dwyer’s English rendition of the Latino literary classic Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi won the Columbia University Translation Center Award and inaugurated the Yale Library of World Literature in Translation. She has also translated Giannina Braschi’s novel Yo-Yo Boing! for AmazonCrossing. With a master’s degree in literature from Rutgers, she edited Review: Art and Literature of the Americas and translated the nineteenth-century social realist novel Martin Rivas by Chilean author Alberto Blest Gana for Oxford University Press. Tess O’Dwyer’s short story about her late Korean mother, entitled “Ballerina of Chestnut Mountain,” won first place in the National Short Story Competition of the Hackney Literary Awards. She is a board member of PEN American Center, Evergreen Review, and Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative. She runs her own arts management consultancy in New York City.