Carina del Valle Schorske is a Puerto Rican writer and translator. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, was recently awarded a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. The jury described her work in progress as “poetic and politically astute…[a] profound work of cultural criticism.”
Carina explores intimate histories of empire, migration, and creative survival in the Caribbean and beyond. Her essays have been published in many venues including The Believer, The Common, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New Yorker online, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is now a contributing writer. She has been celebrated for the depth, nuance, and emotional warmth she brings to her subjects, no matter how famous or obscure. Her profile of the reggaeton star Bad Bunny was featured on CBS. The book chapter she wrote about her family’s ancestral apartment in Washington Heights was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2020.
As a translator, Carina is guided by an ethic of mutual aid and inspired by the everyday inventiveness of people living between languages. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize (judged by Idra Novey) for her “fierce and lyrical” translations of the twentieth century poet Marigloria Palma. In 2018, she collaborated with Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado, and Erica Mena on the bilingual anthology Puerto Rico en mi corazón to raise money for hurricane relief. In 2020, she translated Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book-length essay A Mano / By Hand for Ugly Duckling Presse. Over the next three years, she will serve on the translation team for the Mellon-funded Puerto Rican Literature Project.
Carina’s work across genres has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, CriticalMinded, the Blue Mountain Center, the Robert Silvers Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Banff Centre for Literary Translation, and the Latinx poetry collective CantoMundo.
A graduate of Yale University, Carina is now completing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia, where she also teaches nonfiction writing, feminist theory, and ethnic studies. She lives and works between New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico.