Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. She attended the New York City public school system and received her academic degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Queens College–City University of New York. As a child she was sent to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women in her family, especially the older women. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Dahlma taught creative writing and language and literature in the New York City public school system before becoming a young-adult librarian. She has also taught creative writing to teenagers, adults, and senior citizens throughout New York while honing her own skills as a fiction writer and memoirist. 

The hardcover edition of Daughters of the Stone was listed as a 2010 Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.  In 2020, the self-published the paperback edition of Daughters of the Stone won the 16th Annual National Indie Excellence® Awards for Multicultural Fiction. In 2021, she was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship for Fiction, a City Artists Corps Grant, and the Letras Boricuas Fellow. Her short stories appear in several anthologies, including: Bronx Memoir Project, Latina Authors and Their Muses, Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul, Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012, and Growing Up Girl. Dahlma's work also appears in various literary magazines such as the Afro-Hispanic Review and Kweli Journal. Her her second novel, A Woman of Endurance (Amistad, 2022) is available in hard cover and paperback (Amistad, 2023); as well as a Spanish language edition Indómita (Harper Español, 2022). Since her retirement, Dahlma continues to dedicate herself to her writing, speaking engagements, panels, and workshops. She resides in the Bronx with her husband, photographer Jonathan Lessuck.