Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Professor of English; Professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures, and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies, Queens College; City University of New York
Fellow 2026–27
- Current Project
- Las Girlfriends: A Cultural History of Latina Feminist Writing from 1980 to 1994
- Project Discipline
- American Studies
- Fellowship Title
- Archie K. Davis Fellowship
About Fellow
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is professor of English at Queens College and professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures, and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is a literary scholar who has published on Caribbean and Latinx literatures and cultures, poetics, transnational feminisms, translation, friendship, critical archive studies, and modernism and avant-garde cultures.
She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled “Las Girlfriends: A Cultural History of Latina Feminisms, 1980–1990.” She is coeditor with Dr. Yomaira Vásquez-Figueroa of Archives, Memory, and the Present Past of Puerto Rico (Centro Press 2026). She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014), which was published in a Spanish edition titled Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (University of Illinois Press 2022). She is editor of the bilingual critical edition I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos (University of Texas Press, 2025) and of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010). She translated into English Mayra Santos-Febres’ collection of poetry entitled Boat People (Cardboard House Press 2021) which received honorable mention for Best Bilingual Poetry Book at the 2023 International Latino Book Awards. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
Selected Publications
- Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa, ed. and trans. I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025. A bilingual critical edition.
- Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa. “On Beauty and Protest.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 46, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2018): 279–85.
- Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa. “Latina Feminist Theory and Writing.” In The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature, edited by Laura Lomas and John Morán González, 488–509. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa. “The Afterlives of Julia de Burgos.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 21, no. 3 (no. 54) (November 2017): 209–18.
- Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa. Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. (Available in Spanish as Julia de Burgos: La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño.)