Black women took part in thousands of individual and group escapes during slavery in the Americas. They actively played central roles in insurrections and revolts. In this collection of stories, Arroyo Pizarro examines how, exploited as they were by slavery and other constraints to freedom, enslaved women transgressed, infringed upon, and broke with colonial order.

Join author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in Conversation with Professor Rojo Robles and students of the course LTS 1003 Latin America: An Institutional and Cultural Survey on Afro-Puerto Rican Literature and her book Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women.

October 9 at 11:10AM

Register for this free Zoom event.

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a Puerto Rican writer. She has published books that promote the discussion of Afro-identity and sexual diversity. She is the Director of the Department of Afro-Puerto Rican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based at the Casa Museo Ashford in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is also the founder and chair of Ancestral Black Women, in response to the call by UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade for People of African Descent. She was invited by the UN to speak about women, slavery, and creativity in 2015 as part of the Remembering Slavery Program. Her short story collection Las negras, winner of the 2013 National Short Story Prize from the PEN Club of Puerto Rico, explores the limits of the development of female characters who challenge hierarchies of power. She has also won the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Prize in 2012 and 2015 and the National Award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2008. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese.