Dinah Orozco-Herrera
Dinah Orozco Herrera is an award-winning Colombian Afro-Caribbean poet and educator, as well as a PhD student in the Department of African and African American Studies, with a secondary field in Romance Languages & Literatures, focusing on Spanish. She holds a degree in Education from the Universidad del Atlántico (Barranquilla, Colombia) and a master’s degree in Hispanic literature from the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Bogotá) with the thesis “Towards a Sociocritical Approach: The Afro-Caribbean characters facing Colombian Modernity in the Work of Gabriel García Márquez”.
As a social activist for the rights of Black, Afro-descendant, Palenquera, and Raizal people in the Colombian Caribbean, she was part of the social organization of Black communities “Angela Davis” in Barranquilla. She was a researcher for the Dignification of Afro-descendants through Ethno-education Project in Colombia, which resulted in the publication of a book titled “Investigating Racism and Discrimination in Schools,” published by AECID and the Ministry of Education.
She was selected by the ANTV (National Television Authority of Colombia) as one of the country's most outstanding Afro-Colombian personalities for the following decade: 2015-2024. As an educator, she received the Benkos Biohó National Award in Ethnoeducation for her contributions to the implementation of the Afro-Colombian Studies curriculum in higher education and Early Childhood Education. She has also received the International Afro-Latina, Afro-Caribbean, and Diaspora Women's Day Recognition Award.
As a poet, known by the pseudonym Ashanti Dinah, she has participated in numerous poetry readings and performances both nationally and internationally and has received several awards; the most recent being an Honorable Mention in the Ministry of Culture's Grant for the Creation of Unpublished Works by an Afro-Colombian, Black, Raizal, and/or Palenquera Author. Her poems have been translated into Portuguese, English, Bulgarian, and French, and have been published in various anthologies and a corpus of study in doctoral theses worldwide, including those of the University of Manchester, Latin American Today and Afro-Hispanic Review (USA), Nueva Poesía y Narrativa Hispanoamericana del Siglo XXI (Spain), Latin American Studies Association Review (LASA Forum), Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and L’Amérique Latine Caraïbes (France). She has published two poetry books: Las semillas del Muntú (2019), translated into English as The Seed of Muntu (2025), and Alfabeto de una mujer raíz ǀ Ashanti Dinah Orozco (2025), by Escarabajo Editorial and New York Poetry Press. She is currently the editor of the Alteridades section of Abisinia Review. She is also co-editor, with the Afro-Dominican philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, of the special issue entitled “Vitality/Radical Axé” in the academic journal Apocalyptica, published by the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Her research interests include Afro-Caribbean literature (Anglophone, French, and Dutch), with a special emphasis on Hispanic Afro-Caribbean literature. Her academic work encompasses African diaspora studies, decolonial studies, critical race theory, ecocriticism, Afro-diasporic spiritualities (including Espiritismo, Palo Monte/Mayombe, and Afro-Cuban Santería), performance studies (with a focus on embodiment and spirit possession), Caribbean critical discourse, immaterial archives, Middle Passage studies, and maroonage.
Her doctoral thesis is titled “The Ancestor Speaks!” Spiritual Embodiments: Africana Eco-Philosophies in Afro-Caribbean Literature examines how 20th-century Afro-Caribbean authors from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Colombian Caribbean employ African literary genres and tropes to create and portray, in form and content, the multiple meanings conveyed by Africana eco-philosophies, exploring and narrating two pivotal aspects of Atlantic slavery: the Middle Passage and Marronage. This is a transdisciplinary research project that aims to demonstrate the critical values of African cosmologies in Afrodiasporic writing. There, this thesis develops a literary criticism methodology to interpret how works by Afro-descendant writers from the Hispanic Caribbean mean and narrate the Middle Passage and Marronage as spiritual chronotopes—units of time and space—where spirits, ancestors, and Orishas (Yoruba divinities) transformed the lives and destinies of enslaved Africans and future generations, who adapted, recreated, and reinvented them within the textual realm. In a polysemic sense, these literary works draw on Africana eco-philosophies and represent Afro-Caribbean histories as key sources of Africana critical discourse.
Contact: dinahorozcoherrera@g.harvard.edu