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INTERVIEW / ENTREVISTA
Memory and Revisionist Work in Daughters of the Stone: An Interview with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
keishla rivera-lopez
CENTRO Journal
volume xxxiii • number iii • fall 2021
Keishla Rivera-Lopez (keishla.rivera-lopez@millersville.edu) is a writer, poet, and scholar. She received a PhD in American Studies at the Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. She was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writ-ing. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Latinx Literatures and Cultures at Millersville University.
I flew to Puerto Rico on March 2019 as the graduate assistant for a Michigan State University study away “alternative spring break” trip for undergradu-ate students enrolled in Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa’s course on Puerto Rican history since 1898. These students belonged to a cohort of the Citizen Schol-ars Program at Michigan State’s College of Arts and Letters which contained a project element that led them to do service work. This study away trip was spearheaded by Dr. Figueroa as part of #ProyectoPalabrasPR, a radi-cal literacy project in Puerto Rico, in collaboration with Dr. Mayra Santos Febres’ Salón Literario and Festival de la Palabra.1 During the trip, students were brought to different sites within the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico, including San Juan and Carolina, to learn how Puerto Ricans were still cop-ing with and reconstructing their communities in the aftermath of the 2017 storm, Hurricane María—the most catastrophic storm to hit the island.