AYENDY BONIFACIO

Bonifacio's first academic book, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the U.S. Press, 1855-1901 (Edinburgh 2024), draws on examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals. This work treats English- and Spanish-language newspaper poems and their reprinting culture as interconnected acts of cultural production. Bonifacio proposes a “poetics of paratextuality”—a theory and methodology that shapes the production of newspaper poetry and enables analysis of the page’s anatomy and the connections between poems as framing elements that generate poetic value and taste.

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Bonifacio's current book project, The Printed Island: The Making of Hispaniola in the US Press, 1828-1924, traces the discursive, sociocultural, and racial fragments of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to the rise of the penny press in the early nineteenth century. By examining a range of cultural expressions produced, reproduced, and disseminated in the U.S. press from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, this project argues that coverage of Hispaniola in the U.S. press was deeply intertwined with shifting U.S. attitudes toward slavery, race, and empire. The book explores an expansive and ephemeral archive of advertisements, serials, travel narratives, editorials, illustrations, and poems by anonymous and pseudonymous writers, as well as canonical figures like William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frances Harper. Bonifacio argues that fragmentation and ephemerality are significantly connected to cultural memory—or its absence. The form, shelf life, accessibility, and dissemination of newspapers created a short-term memory about Hispaniola, particularly Spanish Santo Domingo, in the nineteenth century