Xavier Navarro Aquino

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, he is the author of the novel Velorio out from HarperCollins. His fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, among others. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. He holds an M.A. in English Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Currently, Navarro Aquino is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches in the MFA program and in Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience.