Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D.

Academic Degree:

Ph.D. University of California-Santa Cruz (2003)

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Areas of Expertise:

U.S. American, U.S. Latinx, Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, and Caribbean Literatures

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About: 

Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D., is Professor of English at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she teaches Puerto Rican diaspora, Latinx, Caribbean and US American literatures at the BA, MA and doctoral levels. Her essays on Faulkner in a circum-Caribbean context, Puerto Rican diaspora literature, and the crisis in Puerto Rico have been published in peer-reviewed journals and books, including Sargasso, Mississippi Quarterly, Latino Studies, Cultural Dynamics, and Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the American Imaginary (2004), Writing Of(f) the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (2008), Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (2010), Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada (2014), Essays on Tato Laviera: The AmeRícan Poet (2014), Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (2020). In 2020, she and co-author Hilda Lloréns won the LASA-Puerto Rico Section Blanca G. Silvestrini Prize for Outstanding Article in Puerto Rican Studies for “Water is Life, but the Colony is a Necropolis: Environmental Terrains of Struggle in Puerto Rico” (Cultural Dynamics vol. 31. no. 1-2. Feb.-May 2019, 81-101). An award-winning journalist, her columns for The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian helped bring international attention to Puerto Rico’s crisis, starting in 2010. She is the author of De huelga a pandemia en Puerto Rico: una década de intervenciones periodísticas internacionales (2024 Editora Educación Emergente), a collection of select, annotated articles translated by Zinnia M. Cintrón-Marrero. Her most recent poems have been published in Sargasso (2021-2022) and ZiN Daily (2024). A long-time activist, she has also worked for academic unionization at University of California and with the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios (APPU). Raised in New Jersey, of Croatian and Peruvian descent, she has lived and worked in Puerto Rico for more than two decades.