Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon is now available in Spanish. Julia de Burgos: La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño, translated by Isabel Zapata, was published this week by the University of Illinois Press. 

Description: Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century.

In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos’s development as a writer, her experience of migration, her struggles against colonialism and social injustice, and her contributions to Latin American literary and visual culture. At the same time, she unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work in the revisions and reinventions of Burgos that contemporary Latinx writers and artists in New York engage in as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

Vanessa Pérez Rosario is a translator and professor of English at Queens College and professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014) published in Spanish as Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (2022). She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010) and translator of Boat People (2021). Pérez-Rosario currently working on a bilingual anthology titled “I Am My Own Path: The Writings of Julia de Burgos.” She is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. 

Isabel Zapata is a writer, translator, and editor. She lives in Mexico City. 

For more information, see https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086199