Literature and stories have the power to preserve memories and transform identities, especially in complex moments of life. They create spaces where fractured histories and shifting identities can be reimagined into new forms of meaning. For Dr. Lyn Di Iorio, professor of English and creative writing at the City College of New York, that power has guided a career devoted to exploring the complexities of Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Caribbean life.
Dr. Lyn Di Iorio. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Di Iorio.
Her short story “Maritza and Carmen” has been chosen for Best American Short Stories 2025, and she has received a Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society for her in-progress short story collection. For Di Iorio, these recognitions are more than professional accolades, they are also affirmations of the stories and voices she has long been passionate about telling.
Lyn was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was raised between cultures, growing up fluent in both Spanish and English. Her mother was Puerto Rican. Her father was half-Italian and half-Hungarian and Jewish. He introduced her to shows on Masterpiece Theatre and sparked her interest in English literature, while she studied Spanish, Latin American and Puerto Rican literature in school. That bicultural background would shape her lifelong interest in hybridity, belonging, and cultural identity.
Di Iorio pursued English and creative writing at Harvard before earning her master’s in creative writing at Stanford and her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. After early teaching posts, she returned to New York to join City College. While teaching in CUNY’s diverse classrooms, she found a resonance between her students’ lives and her own explorations of identity.
“As a Latina in the U.S., I feel very connected to the way I see students trying to express the hybridity of their identities,” Di Iorio said. “It’s great to confirm it in them, and to see how uniquely it is reflected in their writing and essays about literature”.
Di Iorio’s creative projects have consistently explored that hybridity. Her debut novel, Outside the Bones, was shortlisted for the John Gardner Prize and won a Foreword INDIES Silver Award. It combined magical realism with explorations of desire and spirituality. Her single-author academic book, Killing Spanish, analyzed how figures of dead women in Latina-authored works represent hybrid and ambivalent identities. Across genres, Di Iorio’s work has examined what it means to be caught between cultural worlds.
In “Maritza and Carmen”, Di Iorio expands on that inquiry. The story, part of her in-progress story collection Let Me Take Care of You, revisits Puerto Rican characters first introduced in an earlier piece set during Hurricane Maria, in which Carmen, a stern policewoman, appeared to die in a flood, leaving her daughter Taína to struggle with grief and survivor’s guilt. But in this new tale, Carmen re-emerges, alive, though very much transformed. She renames herself Maritza, shedding both her role as mother and her identity as a police officer. “I began to wonder: what if Carmen didn’t die? What if what died was her identity as a policewoman and a mother?” Di Iorio explained. “Now in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, she’s taken a different name, a different job, a pleasing lover. She’s sexier, more interesting than before. I wanted to give her a chance at a new life.” The story’s exploration of taking second chances at achieving happiness, despite the risk of breaching societal and family expectations, captured the interest of the editors of Best American Short Stories. For Di Iorio, inclusion in the anthology feels like the fulfillment of a long literary dialogue. “It’s a milestone for me, because I love that anthology. The editors perform a monumental task, considering thousands of published short stories every year to make their selection. I’ve been reading it for years,” she said. “I always teach stories from it in my classes, so I’m thrilled that now I’ll have a story in it.”
Beyond her short story collection, Di Iorio is expanding into other fiction with “When Darkness Calls,” a literary thriller about a female serial killer that also explores internalized colonialism. She describes it as a challenge to balance mystery traditions with her own literary instincts. “It’s a 370-page novel, and writing drafts of it while teaching has been quite difficult,” Di Iorio admitted. “But I wanted to meet certain expectations of the genre and still please myself as a literary writer”. Her focus on experimenting with how stories are told, while also staying true to the cultural experiences she writes about, has brought her recognition beyond this year’s awards. She has published stories in The Georgia Review and The Kenyon Review and received a 2021 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Each accolade reflects a body of work that emphasizes Caribbean, Latin American, Puerto Rican and women’s voices in contemporary literature.
At City College, Di Iorio shares a vision with her students, guiding them to explore their own complex intersections of language, culture, and belonging. Her work, whether creative, academic or pedagogical, insists that identity is never singular, instead it is always complex and multifaceted.
“My stories are about identity, repressed colonial history and fractured family life. And I also want there to be more visibility for Puerto Rico and its people who, eight years into the post-Hurricane Maria period, are still in crisis,” she said. “But, really, most importantly, I explore how it is only by making a true connection with others and, especially, the Other—and by that I mean those who are fundamentally different from ourselves—that we can regroup and regrow as individuals and in our society.”
Sofia is a graduate student at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she’s pursuing her M.S. in Media Studies. In addition to writing for The RICC, she’s a writer for the features section of Brooklyn College’s student-run newspaper, The Vanguard. She is also a dedicated writer for the Brooklyn News Service.