Jamie Figueroa

Jamie Figueroa writes toward memory and inherited silence from the thresholds—between languages, identities, and homelands. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (Catapult, 2021) and Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico (Pantheon, 2024), a memoir-in-essays praised for its lyricism, boldness, and decolonial gaze. Her work appears in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Elle, and American Short Fiction, among others. A recipient of the Truman Capote Award and a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar, she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Figueroa is currently in her third year of doctoral studies in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College, where the heart of her research is on Creative Sovereignty through the lens of a Cuentista/Curandera. Her work poses a profound question to writers at all stages of their journey: “When you sit down at your desk to write, who owns you?” Latine-Black-Indigenous, specifically Boricua (also known as Puerto Rican) by way of Ohio, she resides in northern New Mexico, where land and language are in constant conversation.