Nemir Matos-Cintrón


Nemir Matos-Cintrón is a Puerto Rican author who resides in Florida. She has published several books of poetry and parts of a novel. She has openly thematized her lesbianism in much of her work.

Life

Matos-Cintrón was born on November 19, 1949, in Santurce, Puerto Rico. She received her B.A. in Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico and later her Master's of Science from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. During the 1980s, Matos-Cintrón taught television production courses at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico. She also worked as television producer for the all news Channel 24. At the same time she collaborated as scriptwriter for the miniseries Color de Piel, dealing with racial tensions in Puerto Rican contemporary society. Her television writing led her to the creation and scripting of Insólito, a dramatic anthology series dealing with supernatural phenomena in the Caribbean. In the 90's, she returned to academia, as Lecturer at City University of New York. Her passion for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, and Multimedia Technology culminated with the research, production and publication of the multimedia CD-ROM Puerto Ricans in the USA: A Hundred Years. In 2001, she moved to Orlando, Florida where she works as an Instructional Designer. She has completed her doctoral dissertation on mobile learning.

Literary production

In 1981, Matos-Cintrón published her first two poetry books: Las mujeres no hablan así and A través del aire y del fuego pero no del cristal. Las mujeres no hablan así, a poetic and artistic collaboration with Yoland V. Fundora, is the first openly lesbian poetry collection in Puerto Rican literature. Renewed interest in Las mujeres led to a second edition in 2010, followed by recent publications of English translations of poems from the collection in various online magazines and literary journals.
A fragment of Matos-Cintrón's first novel El amordio de Amanda, dealing with growing up in the 1960s in urban Puerto Rico, was included in the LGBT Puerto Rican literary anthology Los Otros Cuerpos.
In 2014, Matos-Cintrón and Fundora published another collaborative collection titled El arte de morir y la pequeña muerte. This collection is the product of a 1991 art installation in San Juan, Puerto Rico and represents an homage to friends who died from AIDS, including her poem "A Manuel Ramos Otero." Also included in this work is a sketch by artist Joaquín Reyes and a poem by Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, an Afro-Puerto Rican attorney, human rights activist, and feminist.
Aliens in NYC, Matos-Cintrón's full-length book of poetry, deals with the subject of migration.

Works