Bio: Dr. Keishla (Kay-shla) Rivera-Lopez was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writing. In her free time she enjoys writing poetry, short-stories, plays and essays. Her writing has been published in Centro Journal, Label Me Latina/o Journal, Hispanofila Journal, Chiricu Journal, The Acentos Review, Decolonial Passage, The Newarker, and The Journal for Latina Feminist Criticism. In 2019 her play “Puerto Rican Kitchen” was selected for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Short Play and Monologue Theatre Festival and won second place for the “Best of the Fest” Award. Keishla’s first chapbook, Craving Home, won Abode Press’s poetry chapbook prize and will be published in 2027.
Keishla is a literary and cultural studies scholar, writer, and poet specializing in Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Latinx Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies with a focus on Latinidad, cultural production, archives, and memory. She received a PhD in American Studies at The Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship to finish her dissertation. Her dissertation received a special recognition distinction for the 2021 Virginia Sanchez-Korrol Dissertation Award Prize by the Puerto Rican Studies Association. She received her B.A. in Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and American Studies in 2015 from Rutgers University-New Brunswick where she was a Ronald E. McNair scholar. She was a 2022 NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellow in American Studies at Montclair State University where she launched the “New Jersey Latino Experiences During the Covid-19 Pandemic” Oral History Project. She was also a research associate for the inaugural Rooted and Relational Fellowship in the 2024-2025 “Archives, Memory, and Present Past of Puerto Rico” cohort at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Currently, Keishla is a visiting assistant professor specializing in Latinx literature and culture in the English Department at Haverford College.
