Author’s Corner

Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Spanish from the InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO. Patricia writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in-between. The former director of events for Politics and Prose Bookstore,  she has contributed to numerous literary magazines and her work has been supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her memoir Women Surrounded by Water is her first book and it was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Patricia Coral was surrounded by women who fought for their needs amid the demands of domesticity and who were dismissed and judged when they rejected any predetermined paths on an island that itself has never been free. At age twenty-five, she married her first love, a green-eyed musician whose internal storms drove Coral to slowly realize that the marriage must end. Faced with disillusionment—with her husband, with the patriarchal expectations that surrounded her like the Caribbean Sea, and with the limited options available to her—she leaves, only for Hurricane Maria to wrench her heart homeward.

Coral evokes the beauty, love, and language of her family and of Puerto Rico as well as the pain of yearning for more. Tastes, colors, and the dreamlike lushness of childhood memories infuse this mournful and propulsive memoir of personal and natural disasters—and the self-discovery made possible only when we choose what to leave behind.

La Isla

The motherland has never been a free country. How do you learn to be free if you’ve never seen freedom? How do you learn, as a woman born in an enslaved island, to be independent? To free yourself when your own country hasn’t been able to. I left behind my mother. Daring to live a life better than hers. How does a colonized woman dare aim for freedom? I was born and raised to fear being left or abandoned. “Any day the USA could get tired of us and leave us to our own luck,” they always told us.

We’ve never been sure of our relationships. Estado Libre Asociado, translated it doesn’t have the same meaning, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The colonialism is disguised. Then you go through life and you don’t mind relationships that have no definition. You are used to being owned without expecting anything in return. You are used to needing your owner, you need to be owned. You are afraid to stand on your own feet: independent.

If you are independent, you could be persecuted, end up in jail, you could get killed. Because if you want to be independent, you’ll be part of a shamed minority. You have to become small because the smallest island from the Greater Antilles is Puerto Rico—“look how small we are,” our geography teachers always taught us when they pointed to the map. And there you are with the irreverence of trying to be big. You have to unlearn that you can’t make it by yourself. They always told you, “The island can’t make it by itself.”

You are a woman and you are an island.

“With all the garbage talk from 45 about the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, it’s imperative to learn the truth about it from the people themselves. This immersive debut memoir is full of robust imagery and lyrical stories of one family of Puerto Rican women.”

— Karla J. Strand, Ms.

“Poetic, intelligent, formally and culturally hybrid, and emotionally powerful, Women Surrounded by Water offers an important meditation on gender, family, imperialism, and natural disasters, amplified by factors like anthropogenic climate change and official indifference. It also introduces into the creative nonfiction genre an eloquent, sensitive, and talented new voice.”

— Glen Retief, River Teeth

“Puerto Rican poet Coral’s haunting, lyrical memoir will captivate readers drawn to raw, introspective storytelling.…With vivid imagery and emotional depth, Coral’s narrative becomes a poignant meditation on how family history and place shape identity.”

— Roxane Pico-Lenz, Booklist

“Whatever you think you know about Puerto Rico, think again. This gorgeous memoir is intimate, profoundly feminist at heart, and one of the most loving books you’ll read this year.”

— Hannah Grieco, Washington City Paper

“Women Surrounded by Water is a memoir-song-ode-manifesto-rosary to the Puerto Rican women of a family with ghosts for men. In the colonial context of the archipelago’s countryside, the men look to the national culture for identity and come away broken, while the women look to tradition, love, and religion to escape the guilt of leaving men who must be left. It is a story of betrayals, of oneself and others, and of the hungers of the heart such struggles leave behind. Coral has contained my very history, my heartbreak, along with her own.”

— Anjanette Delgado, author of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

“A beautiful and intimate memoir with a lot of heart.” — Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“Patricia Coral has composed a work so intimate, so faithful a translation of emotion and experience, with its brilliant writing, its stories of marriage, its lineages of women and the personal and cultural fractures they endured for each other and for love, it is difficult to call this collection a memoir when it is also poetry and family album and historical testament. But it is memoir in the most urgent sense: with unmatched concision, honest remembrance, and adoring care, the author swims her readers through the heretofore terrifying, now vivifying, waters of life. ” 

— David Keplinger, author of Ice

“Every time I read this memoir, it breaks my heart, yet by the time I finish reading my heart feels whole again. These lives and losses leap off the page. Patricia Coral’s language is alternately lyrical and lush, bold and unsparing, always with an awareness of history’s whetted edge. Women Surrounded by Water is a stunning debut.”

— Sandra Beasley, author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life

“’Women Surrounded by Water’ centers on the silenced history of Puerto Rican women and what writer Anjannette Delgado calls ‘our sexile.’ Colonization, patriarchy, and family tie women to the land differently than they tie men to it. Revisiting the history of her ancestras, Patricia Coral tells her own story while also giving voice to the experiences of three generations of women. Using memory and form to decolonize her storytelling, she invites us to ‘senti-pensar’ with her the process of becoming a woman writer, a Latina whose voice can shape the fragmented view we have of Puerto Rico.”  

— Mayra Santos Febres, acclaimed Puerto Rican author and critic