Keishla Rivera-López

Dr. Keishla (Kay-shla) Rivera-López is a literary and cultural studies scholar, writer, and poet specializing in Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Latinx Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies with a focus on Latinidad, cultural production, archives, and memory. She received a PhD in American Studies at The Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. Keishla was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writing. In her free time she enjoys writing poetry, short-stories, plays and essays. Her writing has been published in Centro Journal, Label Me Latina/o Journal, Hispanofila Journal, The Acentos Review, Decolonial Passage, The Newarker, and The Journal for Latina Feminist Criticism. She is currently working on her first book, “Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives.”

I will be working on finishing my first book, Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives during the fellowship year. Boricua Projects examines and showcases how alternative ways of knowing and remembering are used by numerous communities to reconcile with erasure and marginalization. I specifically focus on authors and artists and their works which challenge the narratives of the Puerto Rican experience told to us by museums, textbooks, and archives, which often omit diverse experiences of Puerto Ricanness. Their narratives reproduce racist, sexist, and/or classist representations of Puerto Rican identity. As a praxis of re-narration, I engage with alternative archives and memory projects that exist outside of mainstream conceptualizations of archivization. Memory projects document and preserve experiences and histories in ways that center the populations they seek to represent.