Barbara Mujica is a professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University and a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her latest novel, Miss del Río, is based on the life of Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Frida, based on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, was an international bestseller and appeared in eighteen languages. I Am Venus explores the identity of the model for Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, the painter’s only extant female nude. Sister Teresa, which was adapted for the stage at The Actors Studio in Los Angeles, offers an intimate portrait of Teresa de Ávila, a sixteenth-century nun of Jewish origin who became one of Catholicism’s most beloved saints.
Mujica has won numerous prizes for her stories, including the E.L. Doctorow International Fiction Award, the Pangolin Prize, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for Short Fiction, and first prize in the 2015 Maryland Writers’ Association national fiction competition. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and hundreds of other publications.
Since her son, a U.S. Marine, returned from Iraq in 2008, Mujica has devoted much of her energy to serving veterans. In 2015, she received a Presidential Medal from Georgetown University for her work in this area. Her collection of stories, Imagining Iraq, an Amazon bestseller in 2022, features stories based on incidents veterans described to her. Collateral Damage: Women Write about War is an edited collection of women’s war-writing.
Mujica’s latest scholarly books are Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform; A New Anthology of Early Modern Spanish Theater: Play and Playtext; Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia; Teresa de Ávila, Lettered Woman; and Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia’s Daughters.