Faith in Disguise

Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican writer and professor who has published nineteen novels, short story collections, and poetry anthologies. Her literary work broadly focuses on themes of race and diaspora in the Caribbean, Black female sexuality, desire, and power across historical periods. Her short story collection Pez de vidrio was awarded the Letras de Oro Literary Award and, from this collection, her story “Oso Blanco” was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize. Her first novel, Sirena Selena vestida de pena, was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallego Prize for Novel and won the PEN Club of Puerto Rico’s award for best novel. Her third novel, Nuestra Señora de la Noche, won Puerto Rico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. Santos-Febres teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, focusing on African diaspora, Caribbean, and feminist literature, and is the executive director of Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. Four of Santos-Febres’s works have previously been translated into English: Pez de vidrio (Urban Oracles), Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Sirena Selena), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (Any Wednesday, I’m Yours), and Nuestra señora de la noche (Our Lady of the Night).John A. Mundell is a translator working between Portuguese, Spanish, and English and a poet working largely in Portuguese. He is also an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, and sexuality in literature and popular culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa.

“This nuanced translation opens up these viscerally intersecting worlds of colonial archives, decolonial fantasy, and the perilous but necessary stakes of accessing, interpreting, and being touched by the history of others.”—Zeb Tortorici, co-editor of Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

• Translator’s IntroductionPrefaceFaith in Disguise: A NovellaAcknowledgementsAppendix: Interview with Mayra Santos-Febres