Empire of Dreams

A native of Puerto Rico, Giannina Braschi is an influential and versatile writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. She was a tennis champion and fashion model during her youth in San Juan, before moving to Madrid to study with the Spanish poets Carlos Busoño and Claudio Rodriguez. She lived in Paris, Rome, and London before settling in New York, where she has taught at Rutgers University, City University, and Colgate University. She holds a Ph.D. in Golden Age Spanish literature and has written on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo, and Bécquer. Her cutting-edge work in Spanish, Spanglish, and English has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, el diario, PEN American Center, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and Reed Foundation. She currently serves as a literary judge for the PEN Book Awards.

Tess O’Dwyer's English rendition of the Latino literary classic Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi won the Columbia University Translation Center Award and inaugurated the Yale Library of World Literature in Translation. With a master's degree in literature from Rutgers, she edited Review: Art and Literature of the Americas and translated the nineteenth century social realist Chilean novel Martin Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana for Oxford University Press. Tess O'Dwyer's short story about her late Korean mother, entitled “Ballerina of Chestnut Mountain,” won first place in the national short story competition of the Hackney Literary Awards. She is a board member of PEN American Center, Evergreen Review, and Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative. She runs her own fundraising consultancy in New York City.