Ayendy Bonifacio (he/him/his) 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 and is currently an assistant professor of English at The University of Toledo. Prior to arriving at Toledo in 2020, Bonifacio was an assistant professor of English at his alma mater CUNY-BMCC.
Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals, his book project, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the U.S. Press, 1855-1901, proposes a theory and methodology of “poetics of paratextuality”—a theory that he argues shaped the production of newspaper poetry, and a methodology derived from the archive that lets us analyze the anatomy of the page, the links between and among poems and reprint poems, as framing elements that could generate poetic value and taste. This book is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press's Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture series.
His research is published in American Periodicals, Prose Studies, The Black Scholar, American Literary Realism, J19, The New York Times, Slate, ASAP/Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other scholarly and public-facing venues. 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).
