This study charts language use in two public spheres: literary and digital. Cepeda’s 2015 memoir Bird of Paradise, much like fellow Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s works, utilizes untranslated code switching and requires both linguistic and cultural translations on the part of the reader. Cepeda’s digital public, analyzed via her active Twitter account with over 11,000 followers, employs language in different ways to reach a wider, transnational audience. This essay considers how both Cepeda’s literary and digital spheres connect her to a diverse readership and can be considered examples of (digital) activism.

Numerous anthologies of Caribbean writers—and, more specifically, anthologies of Caribbean women writers—have been published in the last 20 years. Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers (2011) and Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad (2005) represent two similarly curated anthologies that complement earlier volumes compiling the works of Caribbean and women writers. With the recent publication of Daring to Write, editor Erika M. Martínez focuses readers’ attention on a specific, often neglected, subset of Caribbean women writers: Dominicans. Martínez intentionally places little-known works of newcomers alongside fiction and nonfiction written by established Dominican writers such as Nelly Rosario, author of Song of the Water Saints; renowned Dominican poet Rhina Espaillat; Ángela Hernández; and Jeanette Miller. Hernández and Miller, among others, write in Spanish, and the translations of their stories by Achy Obejas succeed in bringing their work to new audiences. The anthology unites in a single volume the voices of Dominican women writing both on and off the island and reflects the myriad diasporic communities in which Dominican women reside, whether temporarily or permanently.