Ayendy Bonifacio was born in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic and raised in East New York, Brooklyn. He earned his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. Bonifacio started as an assistant professor of English at his alma mater CUNY-BMCC and is now an assistant professor of U.S. ethnic literary studies at The University of Toledo. His areas of scholarship include American literature and culture, including Latino/a/x studies; digital humanities; public humanities; transamerican poetics, specifically the reprint poem as a form of public discourse; and hemispheric studies. He is currently at work on two book projects that sit at the intersection of nineteenth-century culture and transamerican studies. The first, Reprint Poems in the U.S. Popular Press (1855-1866) draws examples from over 200 English- and Spanish-language popular dailies and weeklies and argues that reprint poems constitute a vital but still understudied form of public discourse that shaped literary and intellectual life in the U.S. His second book project, The Postcolonial Latino: The Making of Latinidad in the Age of Liberation argues that Latinidad in the Americas emerged and calcified in the nineteenth century as a postcolonial condition bounded up in the literature of nationality, patriotism, and exile in the aftermath of Latin America’s wars for independence.
His research is published and/or forthcoming in American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography; Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism; Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature; Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies; The Journal: A Literary Magazine; The American Review of Books; American Literary Realism, The New York Times; Truthout; C-Span; ASAP/Journal; and Comparative American Studies An International Journal. He is also the author of Dique Dominican (Floricanto Press, 2017) and To The River, We Are Migrants (Unsolicited Press, 2020). In 2018, The Latino Author named Dique Dominican one of the “top ten best non-fiction books of 2017.” Bonifacio's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); The Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC); and The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19).
