Cross-genre writer, scholar, and activist Giannina Braschi was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to an affluent family of Italian descent. While still a teenager, she was a fashion model and the youngest tennis champion in Puerto Rican history. She studied literature and philosophy in Madrid, Rome, Rouen, and London in the 1970s, then moved to New York City, where she remained. Her time in Madrid in particular helped her to develop her poetic craft, via mentorship from elder poets such as Claudio Rodríguez and Blas de Otero. In 1980, she earned her PhD in Hispanic literatures from State University of New York, Stony Brook.
For several years, Braschi published poetic works with Spanish presses, including Asalto al tiempo (Assault on Time) and La Comedia profana (Profane Comedy). Her breakthrough text in the United States was her volume of collected poems, El Imperio de los sueños (Empire of Dreams), first published in Spain in 1988 and then in 1994 with Yale University Press in an English translation by Tess O’Dwyer. This postmodern, genre-bending work earned her comparisons to Samuel Beckett. She followed it with Yo-Yo Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998), the first full-length novel written in Spanglish, which addressed the tensions between English-speakers and Latinx people in New York City. Her 2011 tragicomic work, United States of Banana (Amazon Crossing, 2011), the first she wrote entirely in English, critiques the United States of the post–9/11 era, scrutinizing globalist capitalism, mass incarceration, immigration policies, and the war on terror. Her latest work, Putinoika (FlowerSong Press, 2024), is a cross-genre interrogation of the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump and Putin.
Braschi’s radical work, based on what critic Nuria Morgado calls her “kaleidoscopic gaze on humanity,” is notoriously difficult to confine into a style or genre. Her works embrace and combine poetry, memoir, postmodern fiction, post-dramatic theater, memoir, philosophy, and Nuyorican literature, with a particular focus on geopolitics, Puerto Rico’s history and future, and post-colonial theory. However, her sense of play pervades even her harshest critiques, enriching her multi-faceted works with a comic, satirical bent. Her texts have been adapted into a wide range of genres, including chamber music, photography, theater, sculpture, urban planning, and even industrial design, as when designer Ian Stell built a “Giannina” steel chair that can be reshaped into a floor lamp. The critical collection Poets Philosophers Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer, brings together essays by fifteen scholars on her work.
PEN America calls Braschi “one of the most revolutionary voices” currently at work in the field of Latin American literature. The recipient of the Enrique Anderson Imbert Award from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and the Angela Y. Davis Award from the American Studies Association, she has also received awards and fellowships from institutions including the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Rutgers University, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and PEN America. She has published critical writings on Spanish-language writers including Becquer, Cervantes, Vallejo, Lorca, and Juan Ramon Jimenez. Braschi is a vocal critic of Puerto Rico’s status as a United States territory and the U.S.'s role in global wars. With Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin, she joined successful protests in 2019 demanding the ouster of then–Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello.
Braschi has taught Hispanic literatures at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University. She lives in New York City.
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More Giannina Braschi
Text: Read poems by Braschi at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Braschi and Jon Beasley-Murray discuss Yo-Yo Boing! for SPAN 312
Text: Sarah Ahmad interviews Braschi for Poetry
Resource: Learn more about Braschi on her website
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Photo by Williams Cole.