DIRECTORY LISTING
Biography
María Teresa “Mariposa” Fernández (she/her) is a Lecturer in the English Department at Lehman College, CUNY, where she teaches Creative Writing. Professor Fernández received recognition for her poetry in 2021 from the Mellon Foundation and Flamboyan Foundation with the inaugural Letras Boricuas Mellon Fellowship. She has been a faculty member of the Africana Studies Department at Lehman College, and on the Women and Gender Studies Steering Committee since 2018. She is also a Faculty Fellow of the Transformative Texts / Anchored in the Liberal Arts program (ATLAS), funded by the Teagle Foundation.
A proud first-generation college graduate and Bronx based, Black Puerto Rican poet, educator and activist, Fernández earned her BA in Bilingual Special Education from New York University. Her work has been published in Kevin Young’s anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, and Manteca: Anthology of AfroLatin@ Poets edited by Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas & others. Her work has been featured in the HBO series Habla Ya!, Americanos: Latino Life in the U.S., BET, PBS and the international documentaries, “In Her Own Words: Nuyorican Poet and Activist,” a film by Wilfried Raussert and Alina Muñoz Knudsen and “Fragments of Belonging: El Alma Dividida de Puerto Rico,” a film by Friederike Bischoff and Raphael Vazquez, both produced by Bielefeld University, Germany (2020).