Bio
A native of Vega Baja and Caguas, Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY and Professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies (Hunter), the Program in Black Race and Ethnic Studies (Grad Center). She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College). Prior to joining the faculty at CUNY she was Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of English at Michigan State University.
Yomaira is the author of the award-winning Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020) a book that examines the textual, historical, and political relations between diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Equatoguinean literary poetics. In 2023 Decolonizing Diasporas was translated into Spanish and published by Editora Educación Emergente, an independent Puerto Rico-based press. She is the editor of the double-exhibition catalog for the traveling exhibition Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico & The Survival of a People and the exhibit Coastal Relations, Enacting Diaspora (CENTRO Press, 2025) for which she also served as co-curator. Her current book project, The Survival of a People (Duke University Press), examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican archipelagic and diasporic peoples through the study of intimate and public archives, oral histories, photography, visual art, and film from the 19th century to the present.
Some of her published work can be found in journals such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the Journal of Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, SX Salon, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea (Brasil), Post-45 Contemporaries, Ethnic Studies Rise, Black Latinas Know, and Feminist Formations. She was a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiatives, the study-away project #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the award-winning digital humanities project: Taller Electric Marronage. Yomaira created and led the MSU Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English Program (MUSE) from 2018-2022 and has has served in leadership roles for the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). Yomaira was a 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, 2021-2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow, and a 2022-2024 Crossing Latinidades Faculty Fellow.
She is the PI and co-director of the “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $4M Mellon Foundation Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies. In 2024 she was awarded a $6.4M grant from the Mellon Foundation Presidential Initiatives for “Rooted & Relational” an expansive 5-year project to transform the research and community impact of CENTRO, the oldest, largest, and most important research institute dedicated to the Puerto Rican and diasporican experience.