Writer

Selected Work

Orion Magazine •

Warrior Foods

Jorge Cora and Ana Elisa Pérez Quintero know the sound of a bomb. They were washing vegetables on their nine-acre farm, Finca Conciencia, in 2019, when the earth released a deep scream. The ground shook.

This is the U.S Navy’s method for cleaning its nuclear litter on the east coast of Vieques Island, a municipality of Puerto Rico also known for its turquoise beaches, wild horses, and bioluminescent bay. The unexploded ordnances, bunkers, and mortar shells are the aftereffects of using two-thir
Peaceful Dumpling •

Poetry | Outside, Isla Libertá, And Smell Of Colony

We cry with our roofs below our feet

Inside we hide until it’s over

Outside under the moon so we can read

Inside we bleed from the Arawak wound

Outside the ones who left never to return

Inside the fear of the unknown

Outside the tyrants arrive like in 1898

Inside they eat the organs we puked from shock

Outside we are everyone’s utopia but our own

Shut my eyes to see you lively and light

You knew it was all yours again

The fort, the flag, the song, the bird

Opened my eyes to s
The New York Times •

The Storm is Taking It All

In The New York Times' Tiny Love Story.

"The winds of Hurricane Maria were barreling down our street in the mountain town of Cayey, Puerto Rico. The windows in my parents’ bedroom began to shake. My mother left the room quickly, but my father froze. “I can’t move,” he said. “The storm is taking it all.” My two siblings and I entered. We told him he needed to get out. “I can’t,” he said with a blank stare. We hugged him hard while the windows rattled, threatening to break loose. “Te tenemos, papi,” we said. (“We got you, Dad.”) He looked up at us and started walking."
The Caribbean Writer •

Hijos de Borinquen

"From the dark and rusty colonial door of my apartment, I can see San Justo Street, empty and lifeless in the pre-dawn, but for a single car that appears and hops over the uneven, 500-year- old cobblestoned lane. The buildings are discolored and peeling, and abandoned storefronts float in the early morning fog of Old San Juan. A putrid smell burns inside the nostrils. When did it all go so wrong? The sun warms the earth and the fog evaporates. Blank-faced humans on foot and inside cars start to populate the street. I head out, counting the new “For Sale” signs as I slouch to the soon-to-be-bankrupt supermarket."
Catapult •

Hotel La Plantación | Melissa Alvarado Sierra

I had been mostly working the graveyard shift at the front desk of the hotel in San Juan for about three months, more or less. It was 2004, summer, and I was twenty-one. I needed the money to finish my hospitality degree and the experience to find a better job later. With nothing to do during one parching overnight shift but check-in a few odd folks who arrived late, I wandered about the hotel, over to the parking lot, the restaurant, the bar, looking for Cristina, the clean freak—a buddy of min