Join us for our 118th Poets in Pajamas reading featuring Ayendy Bonifacio.
Ayendy Bonifacio was born in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic and raised in East New York, Brooklyn. He is an Assistant Professor of U.S. ethnic literary studies at the University of Toledo. Using Spanish, English, and Spanglish, his creative writing explores themes of immigration and citizenship, Dominican identity and Latinidad, and memory and loss.
Bonifacio's areas of scholarship are American literature and culture, including Latino/a/x studies; periodical studies; postcolonial studies; poetry and poetics; and the digital humanities. He is currently at work on two book projects that sit at the intersection of nineteenth-century culture and transamerican studies. The first, Reprint Poems in the U.S. Popular Press (1855-1866) draws examples from over 200 English- and Spanish-language popular dailies and weeklies and argues that reprint poems constitute a vital but still understudied form of public discourse that shaped literary and intellectual life in the U.S. His second book project, The Postcolonial Latino: The Making of Latinidad in the Age of Liberation argues that Latinidad in the Americas emerged and calcified in the nineteenth century as a postcolonial condition bounded up in the literature of nationality, patriotism, and exile in the aftermath of Latin America’s wars for independence. His writing is published and/or forthcoming in American Periodicals, Juked, The Acentos Review, Prose Studies, American Literary Realism, the New York Times, and Truthout. He is the author of Dique Dominican (2017) and To the River, We Are Migrants (2020). His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); The Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC); and The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19).
If you would like to request a copy of the poems to be read for accessibility purposes, please email [email protected].