Ivelisse Rodriguez’s (she/her) debut short story collection is Love War Stories (Feminist Press, 2018), a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. Ivelisse was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and raised in Holyoke, MA (which has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico).
In Love War Stories, love is a battleground, littered with cautionary tales of characters on the cusp of romance who covet, wrestle with, and fight to subvert their familial and cultural legacies of suffering from, and for, love. Ivelisse has published fiction in the Boston Review, Obsidian, Kweli, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications.
She was the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. The series was published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She has served as a contest/fellowship/grant judge for several institutions, including the National Endowment of the Arts, the Boston Review, and Kore Press, among others. She has been a guest editor for Pleiades and the Boston Review.
She has taught creative writing to graduate, undergraduate, and independent students at the University of Arizona, University of Missouri-St. Louis, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and numerous writing centers across the country. She is currently working on the novel The Last Salsa Singer about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She currently lives in North Carolina, with two formerly stray cats, The Gemellis, only because her beloved Lhasa Apso, Chocolatte, went on to doggie heaven.
To learn more about Ivelisse, visit: www.ivelisserodriguez.com.
Curriculum Vitae
Part Time Lecturer
Creative Writing Program
Email:
ivelisse.rodriguez@utrgv.edu ELABS 125
Phone: (956) 665-3252