I am a scholar, poet, and educator focusing on Caribbean and Latinx literature and visual culture.
My research on the legacy of the Cuban rafters in U.S. visual culture is now used as a public teaching tool by Smithsonian Learning Lab, and my lesson plan on representations of Caribbean landscapes appears in the National Humanities Center’s (NHC) Digital Library for Educators.
“Having the opportunity to meet with our visiting poet, Deborah Paradez, after spending a full week reading and discussing her various works helped to expand my perspective both of the imagery in her work and its implications for society and the experience of women of color in the face of war and disaster.”
—Student enrolled in Introduction to Latinx Literature, Fall 2024. The poet visit was part of the Latino Poetry Initiative Series, supported by a grant from the Library of America.
“Professor Catasús changed the way I view literature. I have
—Students enrolled in Introduction to Latinx Literature, Fall 2023
a much better appreciation for various texts and WHERE they come from.”
“I enjoyed how knowledgeable Dr. Catasús is in the history and politics of Latinx Literature.”
“[Professor Catasús] is very passionate about the material and has passed that passion on to her students…. [Her] guiding questions have made me think differently about how I look at texts, their form, and their significance in the broader context.”
—Student enrolled in Visionaries, Vanguards, & Vagabonds, Spring 2022
“Professor Catasús is not just a great teacher but also a great facilitator of class. She was able to bring out the best of my thought processes and gave helpful feedback so that I could be a better writer. She is very understanding of different students’ diversity and needs.”
—Student enrolled in Spectacular Visions, Fall 2020
“I had never studied Caribbean history, so this class was able to merge literature and history for me. It gave me a broader sense of how the past in the Caribbean has influenced the present, especially for topics about migration and conflict.”
—Student enrolled in Comparative Caribbeans, Fall 2019
My Philosophy
Across my literature and writing courses, one thing remains constant: I challenge my students to practice a delicate balancing act between critical and creative thinking. Studying the art and craft of literature engages both analytic and imaginative modes of thought. I believe that integrating these modes is crucial to helping students interpret the structures of representation they’ve inherited and imagine their way into a better world.
Teaching Areas
Comparative Literature (Caribbean, Latin America, and U.S. Diaspora)
Critical Theory
Visual Studies
Creative Writing (Poetry & Nonfiction)
Scholarly Writing & Composition
Selected Courses
Introduction to Latinx Literature
This course begins by exploring current debates around terms like “Latino/a/e/x” and “Hispanic,” unpacking the concepts of race, ethnicity, and belonging. From there, we will consider the impacts of Spanish colonization, U.S. empire, and intercultural exchange that shaped early Latinx literature. We will focus on the essays, poetry, and fiction of influential 20th- and 21st-century writers with roots in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Together, we will examine what connects these works while exploring how race, gender, class, nationality, and sexuality complicate the idea of a singular Latinx experience. Along the way, we will tackle big questions: What does it mean to be “Latinx”? How can literature deepen our understanding of identity and culture?
Comparative Caribbeans: Reading Between the Islands
In La isla en peso, Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera laments “la maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes” (the damned circumstance of water on all sides). Taking up the relation he posits between geography and fate (in this case, a curse), this class will examine how writers and artists in the Caribbean and its diasporas have mobilized representations of the landscape and the seascape to grapple with issues of identity, colonization, and “natural” disaster from the colonial period to today.
Alternate Documents: (Re)presentation Across Genres
First-Year Composition
From the news we read to the TV shows we watch, issues of representation pervade every facet of our daily lives. Whose stories are represented, and how are these representations actively composed? In this course, we will explore the aesthetic, formal, and political dimensions of representation through literary and visual works that grapple with issues of citizenship and migration, race and identity, and language and memory. Students will compare popular accounts of these issues with personal narratives that re-present them in a new light, acting as “alternate documents” to the dominant narratives that appear in the mass media and conventional historical accounts.
Creative Forms in Latin American Thought: Visionaries, Vanguards, & Vagabonds
What we say and how we say it: does one matter more than the other? How do we distinguish between the two, and is a distinction even possible? Debates on the relationship between content and form are foundational to the field of literary studies. In this course, we will explore how writers experiment with form to challenge and re-envision relationships between the self and the rapidly changing world. Toward this end, we will ask: How do aesthetic forms allow writers to experiment with new ways of thinking about identity, community, and history? We will focus on texts from Latin America and the Caribbean, regions whose complex histories of political transformation, colonial occupation, and independence movements provide rich sites for articulating the importance, and even urgency, behind the search for proper forms. Creative exercises will also provide opportunities to interrogate literary form through creative practice.
Spectacular Visions: Literature & Visual Culture in the Americas
This course introduces students to theoretical approaches that influence the study of visual culture and its intersections with literary studies. Students will investigate how writers, artists, and theorists address the complex intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, and nationality in light of subjects such as state violence, immigration, and inter-cultural performance in the Hispanophone Americas and the Latinx U.S. The concepts of spectacle, framing, witness and testimony, and mourning and memory will all be central to our discussions. We will begin by practicing conventional ways of reading and seeing, and we will learn to challenge these as the course advances.
Visual Poetics & Poetic Visualities
This course serves as an introduction to reading poetry with a focus on how writers from a variety of linguistic and national traditions engage imagery and other visual forms in their work. We will begin by developing a set of foundational tools for poetic analysis, examining “traditional” poems that play with textual arrangement and white space. From there, we will extend our line of inquiry to hybrid works in which writers incorporate photographic images into the fabric of their texts, adding visual analysis strategies to our critical toolkit. Finally, we will expand our focus to video poems and performance art that foregrounds poetic language (textual and spoken) in tandem with moving images. Weekly “critical-creative” exercises will provide opportunities to interrogate literary form through creative practice and critical reflection.
Writing Cuba’s Afterimage: Intro to Archive-Based Creative Writing
Community-based workshop
This workshop is a space to find modes of expression for transforming your own experiences with Cuba and Cuban American identity into language. We will focus on ekphrastic writing; that is, we will conjure up our impressions of visual materials such as family photos and archival documents to compose poems and short works of fiction and nonfiction. We will read literature by Cuban and Cuban American writers, taking these works as model texts as we delve into a careful study of craft. This means that we will examine not only what these authors write about, but how they write it. The course will provide participants with a toolbox of writing strategies and experiments to help them get their ideas on the page. We will also constructively critique each other’s work, helping one another realize our individual visions for our own writing. Through reading, discussion, writing, and revision, participants will explore the possibilities of voice, take risks with language, and deepen their relationship to Cuban literature and culture.
