The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) has announced authors selected for the Lydia García Author Fund. This fund was created to support authors engaging with the Puerto Rican experience and actively writing or promoting their recent work. The authors selected are Michelle Santiago Cortés, Dr. Jessica N. Pabón, Francisco Félix Canales Dalmau, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, and David Arroyo.
Created by a generous gift from Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, in honor of her mother, Lydia García, these five authors will each receive $1,000 in support. This fund acknowledges the hidden costs of the creative process—from travel to book readings, preparation for presentations, and childcare, to subsidizing events in spaces with limited resources.
Below is more information on the authors chosen for the Lydia Garcia Fund Award:
- Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer and editor from Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, where she writes art and technology criticism for publications like New York Magazine’s The Cut, ArtReview, Dirt, and others. Her work as an editor consists of helping artists express themselves through editorial mediums, and she is a contributing editor for Lux Magazine. She is a student of Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, and she is currently working on a zine about cuteness in Puerto Rican visual culture.
- Francisco Félix Canales Dalmau (Carolina, Puerto Rico) is a writer, editor, and communicator. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, with a focus on Cultural Studies, and a master’s degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. His published works are “Esta isla” (Alayubia, 2019), “Sobre los domingos” (La Impresora, 2020), “Mano negra” (Riel, 2025), and “Tito Rojas ha muerto” (La Pequeña, 2025). In 2019, he joined Beta Local’s “La Práctica” program, and in 2021, he was awarded the Letras Boricuas grant. His writing has been translated into English and French and appears in Puerto Rican and international magazines and blogs.
- Dr. Jessica N. Pabón (she/her) is a diaspoRican performance studies scholar of identity, community, and resistance. Born and raised in Boston, MA, she now lives on the occupied ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape people, in New York’s Hudson Valley. A queer feminist ethnographer, she is the author of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018) and editor of the anthology, Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (The Feminist Press, November 2025). Pabón is currently the President of the National Women’s Studies Association (2025-27).
- A native New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, born and raised in the Lower East Side (Loisaida), David Arroyo has studied and worked in the fields of graphic design, photography, filmmaking, and writing since 2009. He loves to watch all kinds of indie, foreign, and horror films, and voraciously reads as many volumes of manga/graphic novels as he can get his hands on. He lives in NYC with his partner and their beloved handsome cat.
- Peggy Robles-Alvarado is an award-winning educator, poet, performer, playwright, and producer. She is a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a three-time International Latino Book Award winner, and a BRIO award recipient. Her latest poetry collection, BURN ME BACK, published by Four Way Books, was selected as the 2025 Booklist’s Editors’ Choice for Adult Poetry Book. Peggy has earned writing fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights, The Frost Place, The Ashbery Home School, VONA, Candela Playwrights, Dramatic Question Theater, and NALAC.
Headshots for each author are available here.