Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is a cultural critic and historian whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, performances, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. An engaging speaker, she served as a professor at the City University of New York for seventeen years, from 2007-2024, earning the rank of full professor. The author and editor of seven books, she has written on literatures by Black women in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil as well as the field-defining biography of Arturo Schomburg, namesake of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Additionally, she has written on episodes of history in Haiti and Puerto Rico. From 2021-2023, she co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the seventeenth-century man most famous for his portrait made by his enslaver, Diego Velázquez, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue. She is the editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at the State University of New York Press and as the co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press.

TOPICS: History, Race, Writing