Carina del Valle Schorske is a Puerto Rican writer and literary translator. Her essay collection, The Other Island, was recently awarded a Whiting Nonfiction Grant and is forthcoming from Riverhead. The jury described her work in progress as “poetic and politically astute…[a] profound work of cultural criticism.”
Carina explores intimate histories of empire, migration, and creative survival in the Caribbean and beyond. Her essays have been published in many venues including The Believer, The Common, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New Yorker online, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is now a contributing writer. Her profile of the reggaeton star Bad Bunny was featured on CBS. Her essay "Bodies on the Line," about post-pandemic dance floors in New York City, won a National Magazine Award in 2021.
As a translator, Carina is guided by an ethic of mutual aid and inspired by the everyday inventiveness of people living between languages. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize (judged by Idra Novey) for her “fierce and lyrical” translations of the twentieth century poet Marigloria Palma. In 2018, she collaborated with Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado, and Erica Mena on the bilingual anthology Puerto Rico en mi corazón to raise money for hurricane relief. In 2020, she translated Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book-length essay A Mano / By Hand for Ugly Duckling Presse.
Carina’s work across genres has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, CriticalMinded, the Blue Mountain Center, the Robert Silvers Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Banff Centre for Literary Translation, and the Latinx poetry collective CantoMundo.
Carina holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she has taught nonfiction writing, feminist theory, and ethnic studies.
Carina is an alumna of Yale's Ethnicity, Race, & Migration major and looks forward to returning to this welcoming community. While at Yale, she will conduct research for "Monte Adentro," a chapter of The Other Island that investigates the contemporary significance of Puerto Rico’s indigenous material culture—in particular, rock art and ceramics—for artists and amateur enthusiasts surviving a new wave of settler colonialism in the archipelago. Carina plans to spend much of her time in New Haven at the Peabody Museum, which holds the largest collection of precolonial Caribbean artifacts in North America, due to the outsized influence of the (now deceased) Yale archaeologist Irving Rouse.
To learn more about Carina's work, visit her website.