Xavier Navarro Aquino

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Named a "Writer to Watch" by Publishers Weekly for Fall 2021, he is the author of the forthcoming novel, Velorio from HarperVia/HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español in January 2022. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. His poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and is anthologized in Thicker Than Water: New writing from the Caribbean by Peekash Press. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. He holds an M.A. in English Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Currently, Navarro Aquino is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches in the MFA program and in Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience.