Photograph by Rebecca Ann Matthew
ÉRIC MORALES-FRANCESCHINI
MBorn in Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, U.S. Army veteran, and community college graduate who now holds a PhD in Rhetoric from UC, Berkeley and is Associate Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound, 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022), winner of the MLA’s 2023 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and the 2023 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson and Ford foundations, his essays and poetry have been published in a variety of scholarly and literary venues, including Global South Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Age of Revolutions, Small Axe, Acentos Review, Kweli, Muzzle, AGNI, and Boston Review. Syndrome is his debut full-length collection.
Selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Syndrome scrutinizes the rhetoric and naked power by which Puerto Rico became an “unincorporated territory” and its peoples pathologized subjects. That Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony and "Puerto Rican Syndrome" a (formerly) codified disorder cannot, after all, be taken lightly. Conjuring an ensemble of history, anecdotes, anthems, monuments, and statistics, this debut collection reckons with the collective traumas that haunt the Boricua psyche--a psyche vitiated by emancipatory desires as much as geopolitical travesties. In doing so, it strives to de-sublimate the effects of imperial power and enliven a politics for beauty and constituent power. Inventive, rigorous, and unyielding, Syndrome is nothing shy of a counter-diagnosis.