Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s new novel, A Woman of Endurance (2022), illuminates a little-discussed aspect of history — the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade. The story centers on the life of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more enslaved people. Author Cristina García hailed it as “a new classic of Caribbean literature.”

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the South Bronx, Llanos-Figueroa employs fiction to explore the riches and sufferings of Afro-Latina women’s history. Her first novel, Daughters of the Stone (2009), a PEN/Bingham Prize finalist, followed the experiences of five generations of Afro-Puerto Rican women.

In association with the University at Albany’s Celebration of Latin American History Month.