New Voices: Five Emerging Puerto Rican Novelists
By Ana Cristina López | September 2024 | 9 min read
Puerto Rican fiction is having a moment. A new generation of novelists—writing in English, Spanish, and combinations of both—is exploring the complexities of contemporary Puerto Rican experience with fresh energy and innovative technique. These five writers, all with debut or second novels published in the last three years, represent the future of Puerto Rican letters.
1. Xochitl Gonzalez
Notable Work: Olga Dies Dreaming (2022)
Brooklyn-born Gonzalez burst onto the literary scene with a novel that managed to be both a sharp social comedy and a devastating exploration of Puerto Rican diaspora identity. Set among Brooklyn’s Puerto Rican community in the months before and after Hurricane María, Olga Dies Dreaming follows a wedding planner and her congressman brother as they navigate family secrets, political compromise, and the aftermath of disaster.
Gonzalez writes with a satirist’s precision about the contradictions of upwardly mobile diaspora life—the way success in mainstream America requires a kind of cultural betrayal, the gap between political rhetoric and lived reality. But beneath the social comedy is genuine grief: for the island, for family bonds, for the possibility of home.
What makes her distinctive: Gonzalez brings the plotting skills of commercial fiction to literary concerns. Her novel is a page-turner that’s also doing serious cultural work.
2. Javier Zamora
Notable Work: Solito (2022)
Though Zamora is Salvadoran, not Puerto Rican, his memoir Solito has resonated deeply with Puerto Rican readers grappling with questions of migration, belonging, and the particular trauma of moving between worlds. The book, which recounts Zamora’s journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied nine-year-old, captures the child’s-eye view of displacement with devastating clarity.
Zamora’s work speaks to the broader Latinx experience of which Puerto Ricans are part. His poetry, particularly the collection Unaccompanied (2017), has influenced younger Puerto Rican poets exploring similar themes.
What makes him distinctive: The child narrator’s perspective, which renders the ordinary details of migration strange and new, avoiding both sentimentality and political abstraction.
3. Naima Coster
Notable Work: What’s Mine and Yours (2021)
Coster, a Black Puerto Rican writer from Brooklyn, explores the intersections of race, class, and family across generations. What’s Mine and Yours traces two families—one Black, one white—whose lives become intertwined when their children attend the same North Carolina high school during a contentious integration program.
Coster’s earlier novel, Halsey Street (2018), more directly addressed Puerto Rican Brooklyn, following a young artist returning to the neighborhood her family helped build as gentrification threatens to erase its history. Both novels demonstrate Coster’s ability to embed political analysis in intimate family drama.
What makes her distinctive: Coster writes about race with nuance uncommon in American fiction. Her characters aren’t symbols; they’re people making difficult choices under impossible conditions.
4. Rene S. Engel
Notable Work: Sordidez (forthcoming)
Engel represents a different strand of Puerto Rican fiction—experimental, formally adventurous, working in Spanish rather than English. Based in San Juan, Engel has published short stories in literary magazines across Latin America, building a reputation for surreal, unsettling narratives that blend the fantastic with the political.
His forthcoming novel Sordidez (Sordidness) reportedly takes place in a near-future Puerto Rico where the debt crisis has led to increasingly bizarre forms of privatization. The novel has been described as “Kafka meets La Perla”—bureaucratic nightmare rendered in tropical heat.
What makes him distinctive: Engel is part of a younger generation of island-based writers who are rejecting realism in favor of speculative and experimental modes better suited to Puerto Rico’s surreal political situation.
5. Erika L. Sánchez
Notable Work: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017), Crying in the Bathroom (2022)
Sánchez, a Mexican-American writer, is included here because of her influence on Puerto Rican writers exploring similar themes of bicultural identity, mental health, and the particular pressures faced by daughters of immigrant families.
Her young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter has been widely read in Puerto Rican communities, where readers recognize the dynamics of expectation, sacrifice, and cultural disconnection. Her memoir Crying in the Bathroom addresses depression, sexuality, and the writer’s journey with characteristic honesty.
What makes her distinctive: Sánchez writes about Latinx girlhood with a frankness that has inspired younger Puerto Rican women writers to explore their own experiences more boldly.
Common Threads
Several themes connect these diverse writers:
Hurricane María and its aftermath: Even when not explicitly addressed, the 2017 hurricane haunts contemporary Puerto Rican fiction. The disaster exposed the colonial relationship in ways that demanded artistic response.
Diaspora complexity: These writers resist simple narratives of exile and return. Their characters move between worlds, belong fully to neither, and find identity in the movement itself.
Formal innovation: Whether through genre-blending, nonlinear structure, or code-switching, these writers are expanding what Puerto Rican fiction can be. Realism alone cannot capture contemporary experience.
Intersectional identity: Race, gender, sexuality, and class are not separate from Puerto Rican identity but constitutive of it. These writers explore the particular experiences of Black Puerto Ricans, queer Puerto Ricans, working-class Puerto Ricans—refusing the fiction of a monolithic community.
What’s Next
The success of these writers has opened doors for those following. Agents and editors are actively seeking Puerto Rican voices. University creative writing programs are recruiting Puerto Rican students. The infrastructure for Puerto Rican literary production—long dominated by poetry—is expanding to support fiction.
This is cause for celebration but also caution. The literary marketplace tends toward flattening, toward stories that confirm mainstream expectations about marginalized communities. The challenge for the next generation of Puerto Rican novelists is to resist this pressure—to write the complex, contradictory, specific stories that only they can tell.
Ana Cristina López is a literary critic and professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her book “La Nueva Novela Boricua” examines contemporary Puerto Rican fiction.