Education

PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
MFA, Vanderbilt University
BA, Colby College

Specializations and Areas of Research

Creative Writing
Ethnic Studies
Digital Humanities
African American Literature
Latinx/Afro-Latinx Literature
Puerto Rican and Caribbean Studies
African Literature

Current and Recent Projects

I am the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. In 2019,  I co-founded The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a free digital archive, with a team of Puerto Rican writers and scholars from the archipelago and the diaspora, in partnership with the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Program at the University of Houston. In 2021, our team secured a $1.3-million-dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further develop the archive.  Currently, we are expanding the portal to document the lives of Puerto Rican novelists, playwrights, and memoirists. In 2025, we were awarded $1.6 million dollars from the Mellon Foundation to develop this second phase of the archive.