Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies and is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY Hunter. She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract
with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonizaton, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, Post45, and Feminist Forma8ons.

A first-generaGon high-school and college graduate, Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez is passionate about mentoring underrepresented and first-generation students. She earned her BA in English, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. At her former institution, Michigan State University) she founded the Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English Program (MUSE), the
Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the award-winning digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. She is the PI of the 2022-2027 “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $4M Mellon Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies and leads the CENTRO “Rooted and Relational" Initiative, a $6.48M project supported by the Mellon Presidential Initiatives.