Giannina Braschi (born February 5, 1953) is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), the post-modern poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994) and the philosophical fiction United States of Banana (AmazonCrossing, 2011), which chronicles the Latin American immigrants' experiences in the United States. "

In the 1980s, Giannina Braschi burst onto the downtown Nuyorican poetry scene with spoken word performances of rhythmic intensity, humorous gusto, and anti-imperialistic politics. Her prose poems were written, recited, and published entirely in Spanish during this period. Her first collection of Spanish prose poetry, Asalto al tiempo, debuted in Barcelona in 1980 and was followed by La Comedia profana in 1985 and El imperio de los suenos in 1988. New York is the site and subject of much of her work. In a climatic episode of "Pastoral or the Inquisition of Memories", shepherds invade 5th Avenue on the Puerto Rican Day Parade and take over the City of New York; the shepherds ring the bells of St. Patrick's Cathedral and seize the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Poet and feminist scholar Alicia Ostriker has praised Braschi's Empire of Dreams, which features gender role-playing and transvestism, for having "sheer erotic energy that defies definition and dogma." "Those three award winning books were published together as the inaugural volume of the Yale Library of Literature in Translation." (Braschi 1998: Yo-Yo Boing!: 13) In the 1990s, Giannina Braschi began writing dramatic dialogues in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Her bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! (AmazonCrossing) is experimental in format and radical in its defiance of English-only laws, ethnic cleansing campaigns, and the corporate censorship. In 2011, Giannina Braschi debuted "United States of Banana," her first work written entirely in English; it is a postmodern dramatic novel about the powers of the world shifting after September 11. The work is a poetic critique of 21st century capitalism and corporate censorship. In 2012, "The Economist cited "United States of Banana" among the best sources for bold statements on the economy: "Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion". "United States of Banana," takes as a springboard the collapse of the World Trade Center, the event which displaced her from the Battery Park neighborhood that became known as the Ground Zero vicinity. Braschi writes about the death of the businessman, the end of democracy, and the delusion that all men are created equal. "Revolutionary in subject and form, "United States of Banana" is a beautifully written declaration of personal independence," declared the late publisher Barney Rosset former owner of Grove Press of "Evergreen Review." The main characters are Zarathustra, Segismundo, Hamlet, Giannina and the Statue of Liberty; cameos are made by Latin American left wing leaders Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez, Cristina Kirchner, and Evo Morales.

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