Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

  • “With all the garbage talk from 45 about the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, it’s imperative to learn the truth about it from the people themselves. This immersive debut memoir is full of robust imagery and lyrical stories of one family of Puerto Rican women.”

    — Karla J. Strand, Ms.

  • “Poetic, intelligent, formally and culturally hybrid, and emotionally powerful, Women Surrounded by Water offers an important meditation on gender, family, imperialism, and natural disasters, amplified by factors like anthropogenic climate change and official indifference. It also introduces into the creative nonfiction genre an eloquent, sensitive, and talented new voice.”

    — Glen Retief, River Teeth

  • “Puerto Rican poet Coral's haunting, lyrical memoir will captivate readers drawn to raw, introspective storytelling.…With vivid imagery and emotional depth, Coral’s narrative becomes a poignant meditation on how family history and place shape identity.”

    — Roxane Pico-Lenz, Booklist

  • “Whatever you think you know about Puerto Rico, think again. This gorgeous memoir is intimate, profoundly feminist at heart, and one of the most loving books you’ll read this year.”

    — Hannah Grieco, Washington City Paper

  • “Patricia Coral has composed a work so intimate, so faithful a translation of emotion and experience, with its brilliant writing, its stories of marriage, its lineages of women and the personal and cultural fractures they endured for each other and for love, it is difficult to call this collection a memoir when it is also poetry and family album and historical testament. But it is memoir in the most urgent sense: with unmatched concision, honest remembrance, and adoring care, the author swims her readers through the heretofore terrifying, now vivifying, waters of life. ”

    David Keplinger, author of 'Ice and Another City'

  • “'Women Surrounded by Water' is a memoir-song-ode-manifesto-rosary to the Puerto Rican women of a family with ghosts for men. In the colonial context of the archipelago’s countryside, the men look to the national culture for identity and come away broken, while the women look to tradition, love, and religion to escape the guilt of leaving men who must be left. It is a story of betrayals, of oneself and others, and of the hungers of the heart such struggles leave behind. In this one-of-a-kind seashell of a memoir, Patricia has contained my very history, my heartbreak, along with her own.”

    Anjanette Delgado, author of 'The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho'

  • “A beautiful and intimate memoir with a lot of heart.”

    — Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

  • “Every time I read this memoir, it breaks my heart, yet by the time I finish reading my heart feels whole again. These lives and losses leap off the page. Patricia Coral’s language is alternately lyrical and lush, bold and unsparing, always with an awareness of history’s whetted edge. “I’m the one in-between sizes, in-between countries, in-between categories,” the narrator admits. “Sometimes I don’t know if I should shrink or expand.” Women Surrounded by Water is a stunning debut.”

    Sandra Beasley, author of 'Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life'

  • “'Women Surrounded by Water' centers on the silenced history of Puerto Rican women and what writer Anjannette Delgado calls ‘our sexile.’ Colonization, patriarchy, and family tie women to the land differently than they tie men to it. Revisiting the history of her ancestras, Patricia Coral tells her own story while also giving voice to the experiences of three generations of women. Using memory and form to decolonize her storytelling, she invites us to ‘senti-pensar’ with her the process of becoming a woman writer, a Latina whose voice can shape the fragmented view we have of Puerto Rico.”

    Mayra Santos-Febres, author of 'Antes que llegue la luz'

About the author

Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Spanish from the InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO. Patricia writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in-between. The former director of events for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines and her work has been supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her memoir Women Surrounded by Water was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.


Patricia Coral es una escritora y gestora cultural puertorriqueña. Completó un BA en Estudios Hispánicos en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, una MA en Español en la Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico y un MFA en Creative Writing en American University donde fue galardonada con The Myra Sklarew Award y sirvió como editora en jefe de la revista literaria FOLIO. Patricia escribe no ficción, ficción y poesía, pero con frecuencia sus textos habitan en los espacios híbridos. Su trabajo ha sido publicado en numerosas revistas literarias y ha recibido apoyo de DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Su memoria Women Surrounded by Water fue incluida en la lista larga de 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award en la categoría de autobiografía.

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