Vanessa K. Valdés

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is a writer and independent scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. An engaging speaker, she served as a professor at the City University of New York for seventeen years, from 2007-2024, earning the rank of full professor. She is the editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012); The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012); Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020); and, with Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood of the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). From 2021-2023, she co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velazquez (2023). She is the editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at the State University of New York Press and is the co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press.