Mayra Santos-Febres was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1966. She studied literature at the University of Puerto Rico and received her PhD from Cornell University.   She has been a visiting scholar at Rutgers University (1992), Cornell University (1994) and Harvard University (2004), as well as at the Complutense University in Spain (2013), the Autonomous University of México, Yucatán Campus (2008) and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (2005).   She co-created the Creative Writing Program at the University of Puerto Rico and founded and directed The Word/Festival de la Palabra, the most internationally recognized literary festival in Puerto Rico (2010-2009). Content Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Institute at the UPR, Mayra Santos -Febres is currently the Principal Investigator for the development of the University of Puerto Rico’s Afro Diasporic and Race Studies Program, which was recently awarded a Mellon Foundation grant for academic diversification.  

As a writer, Mayra Santos-Febres has won many international prizes and awards, including the Letras de Oro Award (Spain, 1994), the Radio France Juan Rulfo Award (1998), the Premio Primavera Award, Spain (201) for her novel Nuestra Señora de la Noche, the John S. Simmon Guggenheim Fellowship (2015) and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency (2018). Her work has been translated into French, English, Italian, Romanian, Korean, Portuguese and Icelandic. She has published the poetry collections Anamú y manigua (1990), El orden escapado (1991), Boat People (1994), Tercer Mundo (2004), Lecciones de renuncia (2021) and Huracanada (2018). Her short story collections include Pez de vidrio y otros cuentos, El cuerpo correcto, Un pasado posible and Mujeres violentas. She has also published the novels Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2001), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (2002), Fe en disfraz (2009), Nuestra Señora de la noche (2006) and La amante de Gardel (2015), and the essays Tratado de Medicina Natural para Hombres Melancólicos (2011) and Sobre piel y papel (On skin and paper). In 2019 she won the Prix Nationale de Litterature de l’Academie de Pharmacie in Paris, France for La amante de Gardel.