“A definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets.” I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos (University of Texas Press), edited by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, will be on the shelves soon: October 14, 2025.
Julia Álvarez (author of The Cemetery of Untold Stories) articulates our sentiment the best: “How grateful I am that nuestra Julia de Burgos, writer, feminist, social activist, can now become more fully accessible to monolingual English readers. With this comprehensive critical introduction to her life and work, nuestra Julia becomes a Julia for all of America. A treasure trove for those who did not know of her work or want to know more.”
Description: Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.
Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos’s life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx literature and culture in the United States.
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is a translator and a professor at the City University of New York, and the managing editor of Small Axe, a project devoted to Caribbean cultural criticism. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon, which is also available in Spanish.
For more information, see https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477327937/