About
Ms. Llanos-Figueroa is an Afro Puerto Rican historical novelist writer whose work is grounded in the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in New York City. Her longer narratives, though universal in nature, are heavily influenced by West African mystical symbology and 20th Century Latin American magical realism, while her shorter pieces are grounded in urban realism.
Her first novel in a series, Daughters of the Stone, was shortlisted for the 2010 PEN Bingham Award. The 2020 self-published trade paperback edition won the 16th Annual National Indie Excellence® Awards for Multicultural Fiction. She was awarded the 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction, and the 2022 Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Award in 2022.
In 2023, her second novel in the series, A Woman of Endurance, was published by Amistad, HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español. The Brazilian edition was published in Portuguese by Primavera the following year. In 2024 Indómita, the Spanish-language edition of A Woman of Endurance won the International Latino Book Awards bronze medal for historical fiction and the gold medal for the English-to-Spanish translation. Indómita. It was also selected to represent Puerto Rico in the Library of Congress Great Reads, Great Places initiative at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, DC.
Ms. Llanos-Figueroa’s work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Kweli Journal, Label Me Latina, The Latino Book Review, The Afro-Hispanic Review, Auburn Avenue, and Pleiades. She has contributed to several anthologies, including Breaking Ground: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York City 1980-2012; Latina Authors and Their Muses; Trauma, Tresses and Truth; Daughters of Latin America, and Indomitable/Indomable 2024.
Currently, Ms. Llanos-Figueroa is working on Of Mothers & Daughters, the third novel in the series and, Father Revisited, a memoir. She is grateful for the support by, among others, Kimbilio, VONA, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hedgebrook, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Macondo and MacDowell.
When not writing, Ms. Llanos-Figueroa teaches creative writing workshops.
Featured Work
A Woman of Endurance: A Novel
Combining the haunting power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative atmosphere of Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves.
A Woman of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply spiritual African woman who is captured and later sold for the purpose of breeding future slaves. The resulting babies are taken from her as soon as they are born. Pola loses the faith that has guided her and becomes embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat but rather one of survival, regeneration, and reclamation of common humanity.
Readers are invited to join Pola in her journey to healing. From the sadistic barbarity of her first experiences, she moves on to receive compassion and support from a revitalizing new community. Along the way, she learns to recognize and embrace the many faces of love—a mother’s love, a daughter’s love, a sister’s love, a love of community, and the self-love that she must recover before she can offer herself to another. It is ultimately, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even under the most brutal of conditions.
Other Works
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Daughters of the Stone
2009
Awards and Recognition
- 2024 Great Books, Great Places, Library of Congress, National Book Festival, Washington DC; 2024 Latino Book Awards for Historical Fiction and Spanish-Translation 2024 McDowell Fellowship; Letras Boricuas, Mellon Foundation Award 2022
