A little about Rima

Rima Brusi-Gil de Lamadrid, PhD, was born in Puerto Rico. She is a writer, anthropologist, and educator. She writes literary non-fiction, is a columnist for 80grados and Claridad, and is the author of four books: Mi tecato favorito y otras crónicas (EEE, 2011), Entre la bicha y la pared (ICP, 2019), Fantasmas (EEE, 2019; PEN award 2020), and Chulos de la pobreza (EEE, 2021).

Rima is also an expert on educational and geographic inequality. She regularly collaborates with groups and organizations focused on social and educational justice, and speaks, presents, and publishes on these topics at conferences, in academic journals, and across media including NPR, Univision, and The Nation.

She was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, co-founder and director of the University Center for Access (CUA), an applied anthropologist at The Education Trust, and a distinguished lecturer in anthropology and writer-in-residence at the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies in CUNY's Lehman College. Today she is a Professor at Northern Arizona University's Honors College, and shares life, children, joys, pets, and the dream of a distant ocean with her husband, JL.

Rima Brusi-Gil de Lamadrid, PhD, nació en Puerto Rico. Es escritora, antropóloga y educadora. Escribe crónica literaria y ensayo, es columnista en 80grados y Claridad, y es autora de cuatro libros: Mi tecato favorito y otras crónicas (EEE, 2011), Entre la bicha y la pared (ICP, 2019), Fantasmas (EEE, 2019, premio PEN 2020) y Chulos de la pobreza (EEE, 2021).

Es además experta en el tema de desigualdad educativa y geográfica, colabora regularmente con grupos y organizaciones enfocadas en justicia social y educativa, y habla, presenta y publica sobre estos temas en conferencias y revistas académicas y en medios diversos, incluyendo NPR, Univisión y The Nation.

Fue profesora en la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayagüez, co-fundadora y directora del Centro Universitario para el Acceso (CUA), antropóloga aplicada en The Education Trust y distinguished lecturer en antropología y escritora residente en el Centro de Derechos Humanos de Lehman College-CUNY. Actualmente trabaja como profesora en la facultad de Honores de Northern Arizona University y vive en Flagstaff con su esposo JL, con quien comparte vida, hijes, mascotas y el recuerdo de un mar distante que llaman «casa».

"A gorgeously written memoir, Phantoms is a soul-searching exploration of motherhood, abandonment, and spirituality with a peek into the 1970s Puerto Rico. Rima Brusi's deeply personal work sits alongside Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican as a seminal Caribbean piece of art. Searing and poetic, Phantoms is a must read!"

— Lilliam Rivera, author of Tiny Threads

"A book of rare intelligence and great emotional delicacy: a constellation of intimate stories and essays in which Brusi turns fractured memory, motherhood, the body, illness and affective inheritance into a work of remarkable lucidity and beauty. With prose that is elegant, incisive and profoundly human, she explores the phantoms of the mother, childhood and the self without ever lapsing into sentimentality or self-pity. The result is an engrossing, original and moving book, written by an author capable of thinking with rigor, remembering with courage and transforming experience into true literature."

— Pedro Cabiya, author of Reinbou and Wicked Weeds

"Rima Brusi is a consummate storyteller. In Phantoms, she recounts the stories of several generations of Puerto Rican women in her family, exploring memory, motherhood, writing, absence and trauma in an unsentimental, lucid voice that is at once personable and incisive, demanding yet empathetic. Echoing Luis Rafael Sánchez's classic essay, "¿Por qué escribe usted?" (Why do you write?), Brusi's finest work of autoethnography suggests that writing — and its close companion, reading — are vital tools for making sense of chaos, anger, happiness and remembrance. Tender and sharp, it showcases the very best of contemporary Puerto Rican literature. Translator Jessica Powell does a formidable job capturing Brusi's playful engagement with language and her insistence on finding exactly the right words."

— Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of CUNY and author of Women in San Juan, 1820-1868

"Reading this book is a physical experience, not only because of the clarity, rhythm and beauty of its narrative voice, but because the author writes with her whole body, feeling every abstract word until it becomes alive. In a world obsessed with outcomes over process, Brusi offers a gift to the reader: a meditation on what it means to share our piece of the collective memory and on writing itself as an ethics both for life and for art. Not every day you read a book that stays inside you as a happening to the soul."

— Ana Teresa Toro, author of Secuestro Pulmonar

"A different yet equally moving experience from its Spanish incarnation, Fantasmas. With two additional essays, the aptly named Phantoms attends both to things that are present in some spectral form and to those that were once there but no longer are. Brusi is a stellar writer with a meticulous way of choosing exactly the right word to convey a feeling, an idea, a sensibility. This is a must-read for anyone who values thoughtful, real-life storytelling."

— Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, co-author of Feminism after 9/11

"Brusi takes you on a path of the "abecedeary" of memory and forgetting, poetically connecting the fissure of taboos and norms by breaking generational histories of silence. Poignant, entertaining, sometimes shocking but always seeking the truth of her experiences, she shares raw glimpses of private childhood spaces closed to outsiders — from the hunger of poverty and clogged toilets in Puerto Rican public schools to a cultish marijuana community in Colombia, to Santería initiation back on the island to the multiple childhood abandonments that happened in tandem. An ethnographer of her own life, she follows the scent that drives her to write and remember, taking the reader along on her clear-eyed journey to make sense of who she is and where she comes from. A tour de force."

— Victoria Sanford, author of Buried Secrets