Dr. KC Barrientos was born and raised in cosmopolitan New York. After obtaining her BA/MA, summa cum laude, in Spanish Literature and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, from the University at Albany, she won a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame and there earned her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures. Having always been enamored of poetry and cinema and compelled by the contemporary struggles of women in interracial and migratory spaces, Dr. Barrientos wrote her dissertation, Bodies Remembered, as an exposition of the suffering and reclamation of feminine bodies in a canon of 20th- and 21st-century feminist poets from the Spanish Afro-Caribbean. For her dissertation work, Dr. Barrientos was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to teach her specialization at Notre Dame.

Throughout her years of teaching and research, Dr. Barrientos has led seminars on race and human rights; the Central American and Caribbean diaspora north; shifting Latinx identities; Fanonist incarnations of decoloniality; the problematics of borders and contemporary conquest; and the ethics of postcolonial tourism. In addition to Frantz Fanon, other writers she finds foundational to her thought and work are Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat on the marginalization of black and brown bodies. Her favorite poet at present is Elizabeth Acevedo, on whose work she published an award-winning article, “‘Stranded’: Interrogating the Shame of the Afro-Latina Female Body.”

In her personal time, Dr. Barrientos enjoys not only reading poetry, but also writing her own. She likewise engages in other art forms such as singing operatic pop, playing classical piano, and drawing realist pencil portraits. She is thrilled to share her artistic passions and scholarly expertise in the classroom with the vibrant, diverse community of the University of South Carolina.