Between Tongues…
… is where I write from the mess, music, and minor diplomatic incidents of living between languages, countries, roles, and literary forms.
I am a Cuban writer, educator, and editor based in New Jersey, with roots in Havana and a lifelong allergy to obedient categories. This publication gathers essays, interviews, notes, dispatches, and reflections on literature, culture, teaching, bilingual life, motherhood, diaspora, and the bizarre expectation that creative work should survive on passion, prestige, and cafecito.
Some pieces here are personal. Some are critical. Some are archival. Some arrive in English, misbehave in Spanish, flirt with theory, quote a dead poet, side-eye capitalism, and leave before anyone can call them “content.” Genre, como la patria, is often a bureaucratic fiction.
What holds this space together is a recurring set of obsessions: Cuba and diaspora, Spanish and English in productive trouble, queer and intellectual life, cultural memory, literary autonomy, teaching as both vocation and performance art, motherhood without pastel filters, and the eternal question of how to build serious work without sanding it down into something more marketable, more polite, and substantially less alive.
I write as someone shaped by poetry, fiction, criticism, scholarship, classrooms, editorial work, and independent cultural production. Which is to say, by beauty, exhaustion, footnotes, PDFs, students, deadlines, and the occasional existential crisis con tumbao. I hold a PhD from Princeton University, where my dissertation examined digital technology and the contemporary Cuban literary field, because apparently I enjoy complicated ecosystems with unreliable infrastructure. I have taught at Princeton, The Lawrenceville School, and The Pennington School, and I am the founder of The Ethical Press, a literary and pedagogical project devoted to creating less extractive, more sustaining conditions for writers, artists, teachers, and cultural workers who are tired of being told that exposure is a form of payment. Exposure is what happens when you forget a coat.
If you care about literature, Cuba, bilingual life, culture, pedagogy, queer intelligence, and the beautifully inasimilable labor of making a writing life, bienvenide.
Come in. The coffee is strong. The language will not behave. And neither, hopefully, will we.
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