Cuban-born writer and scholar Odette Casamayor was the 2015 Wilbur scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Afro Latin American Institute at Harvard University. Casamayor is also the recipient of several international awards such as the Prix “Juan Rulfo” of International Essay Award (Paris, 2003) and the “José Juan Arrom” National Prize of Literary Essay by the Union of Cuban Writers (Havana, 2009). She is the author of the book Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (Utopia, Dystopia and Ethical Weightlessness: Cosmological Reconfigurations in post-Soviet Cuban Fiction),  published by Iberoamericana- Vervuert in 2013. Her first book of stories Una casa en los Catskills been published in Puerto Rico (La Secta de los Perros, 2011) and Havana (Letras Cubanas, 2015). Portions of her research on blackness and Cuban cultural production are available as chapter books and articles in peer-reviewed publications from Duke UP, Routledge, Vervuert, Gale and other prestigious academic publishers. Casamayor is currently writing another book tentatively titled On Being Blacks: Challenging the Hegemonic Knowledge Through Racial Self-Identification Processes in Contemporary Cuban Cultural Production.

Jacqueline Loss’s most recent publications on Cuba include Dreaming in Russian: the Cuban-Soviet Imaginary (2013, and in Spanish, Almenara forthcoming) andCaviar with Rum: Cuba- USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience (co-edited with Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto). Her first book, Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America against the Destiny of Place (2005), also dealt with Cuba, cultural capital and the Internet. Her co-edited New Short Fiction from Cuba (2007, with Esther Whitfield) was a collection of twelve diverse stories from the island written at the turn of the 21^st century.  Her essays, translations and interviews can be found in numerous publications including New Centennial Review, La Habana Elegante, Bomb magazine, La Gaceta (Cuba), Kamchatka (Spain), Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos and Revista de estudios latinoamericanos (Poland), among many others. She is also in charge of the “Translation Magic” column ofCuba Counterpoints, for which she serves on the advisory board and is working on a digital humanities and documentary project around Cuba at finotype.org.

Laurietz Seda, holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of Kansas, and is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (2008) and two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Grants (2000, 2003), professor Seda is the editor of the theatre anthology La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña and co-editor of Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performance (Bucknell University Press, 2009) and Teatro de frontera11/12.   She was the guest editor for a Special Issue on Caribbean Theatre for  Latin American Theatre Review (Spring 2004).  Professor Seda  is member of the editorial board for Latin American Theatre Review, Revista Teatro XXIand Boletín del Archivo Nacional de Teatro y Cine del Ateneo Puertorriqueño.   She has also published numerous essays on contemporary Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Argentine, and Chilean theatre in edited collections and in journals such as Hispanic Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Conjunto, and Revista Teatro XXI.  In 2005 she directed and organized the VI Conference/Festival Latin American Theatre Today:Translation, Trangender and Transnationalism. And in the same year she created the George Woodyard Latin American Theatre Award (Premio de Teatro Latinoamericano George Woodyard).