TODAY: Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa in Conversation and Launch of Taller Entre Aguas (#DSLxTeaLaunch)
Join us on the wave!
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, author of A Woman of Endurance (Amistad Books) on history, memory, world-building and Afro-Puerto Rican women’s lives. In conversation with Melanie Maldonado-Torres. This event also launches the CKL MicroLab Taller Entre Aguas!
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. As a child she was sent to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women in her family, especially the older women. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Llanos-Figueroa taught creative writing, language and literature in the New York City school system before becoming a young-adult librarian and writer. The hardcover edition of Daughters of the Stone was shortlisted as a 2010 Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her scond novel, A Woman of Endurance released in April 2022, the Spanish language edition, Indómita releases in May 2022. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and literary magazines such as Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012, Growing Up Girl, Afro-Hispanic Review, Pleaides, Latino Book Review, Label Me Latina/o, and Kweli Journal. She lives in New York City.
Melanie Maldonado is an artivist and educator with doctoral training in Performance Studies. She has a background in theatre and has performed traditional Puerto Rican music for 20+ years. In 2005, she both started the biennial Bomba Research Conference and received a Diaspora Research grant from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She is published through Cambridge Scholars Press (2008) and the Centro Journal (2008), served as a Boricua slang editor for HEY YO! ¡YO SOY!! (2012) and Obatala’s Bugalu (2013); and contributed to the Grove Dictionary of American Music (2013) and the Centro Journal (2019). In 2011, Melanie started a Lugares Históricos project which highlights Black history sites in Puerto Rico (about which she has two forthcoming book chapters). In 2018, she led a first-of-its-kind community tour of these ancestral spaces and in 2019 began placing historical markers at these locations of importance for African diasporic gathering and traditional practices. Her work in Bomba has received five mayoral proclamations and recognitions by Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives. In 2021, Melanie started the Africa Habla en Mi Puerto Rican genealogy series. She is committed to creating access, building commUnity and helping families re-member the legacies of their ancestors. Her bomba research explicates women’s agency, the importance of textiles, genealogy, lineages of learning, songs as critical records, placemaking and historic spaces of praxis. Melanie is an alumnus of the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program and is a state appointed grant reviewer for arts and culture in Florida. She serves as a board officer of the Escuela de Bomba y Plena Tata Cepeda (FL), Alianza Center (FL), Colectivo Umoja (PR) and her local PTA. Melanie was one of the 2020 Women in Culture for the New Jersey-based Raices Cultural Center, a 2021 Matriarcado honoree for Buffalo, NY-based El Batey and a 2022 speaker of both the Afrorriqueñes series at Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Chicago and the Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Symposium at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia.
Taller Entre Aguas is a Community Knowledge Lab MicroLab under the Mellon-funded Diaspora Solidarities Lab. Learn more here: dslprojects.org
