This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx authors of her generation. Since the 1980s, Braschi’s linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and poetic hilarity have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word.  Her best-known titles are El imperio de los sueños, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English and embraces timely and enduring subjects: love, liberty, creativity, environment, economy, censorship, borders, immigration, debt, incarceration, colonialization, terrorism, and revolution. Her work has been widely adapted into theater, photography, film, lithography, painting, sculpture, comics, and music. The essays in this volume explore the marvelous ways that Braschi’s texts shake upside down our ideas of ourselves and enrich our understanding of how powerful narratives can wake us to our higher expectations.

Frederick Luis Aldama is distinguished university professor at the Ohio State University with a joint appointment in Spanish and Portuguese as well as faculty affiliation in film studies and the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over 40 books and the editor of 9 book series. For more on Aldama visit https://professorlatinx.osu.edu/.
 
Tess O’Dwyer won the Columbia University Translation Center Award for her rendition of Giannina Braschi’s postmodern poetry epic Empire of Dreams and translated Braschi’s Spanglish classic Yo-Yo Boing! as well as Martin Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana. She is the Chairman of the Board of the Academy of American Poets.