Cintia Santana

Cintia Santana specializes in 19th and 20th Century Spanish literature, particularly in the cultural relationships between Spain and the United States. Her research interests include transatlantic and translation studies, the Latin American and Spanish short story, and Latin American, Spanish, and English-language poetry. Santana teaches translation, fiction, and poetry workshops in Spanish and in English.  She is a recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize (2014) and advises the minor in Translation Studies.  

Her book, Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975-1995) (Bucknell University Press, 2013) broadens the scope of transatlantic studies by accounting for the "boom" of U.S. fiction in Spain after the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The book examines the economic, literary, and socio-cultural elements that underlay the influx of these so-called dirty realist writers—which in Spain included authors as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Bret Easton Ellis, and the subsequent impact on a new generation of Spanish writers in the 1990s who insistently claimed these U.S. writers as their literary forefathers.

In additional to her scholarship, Santana's short stories, poems, and translations have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology,  Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She is a CantoMundo fellow and a recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellowship. 

Santana's collection of poetry, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and was short-listed for the 2023 California Independent Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Award. Additionally, her book received the 2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze Medal and the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal. Interviews and reviews of her work can be found in Poets & Writers, The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Hive Poetry Collective, and Poetry International Online.