Irene Vilar

Who is Irene Vilar?

Irene Vilar is an editor, a literary agent and an author of several books dealing with national and generational trauma and women's reproductive rights. Born in Puerto Rico, Vilar is the granddaughter of Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who participated in an assault on the United States House of Representatives in 1954. Her work The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets was a Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year, a finalist for the Mind Book of the Year Award and the Latino Book Award. Her memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, revealed that the author had 15 abortions in 17 years. Vilar received death threats after its publication.

Vilar previously worked as an acquisitions editor for Women and Jewish studies at Syracuse University Press. From 2002 to 2005, she was the founding series editor of The Americas book series published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Presently she is a series editor at Texas Tech University Press. She founded her own literary agency, Vilar Creative Agency, and serves as a co-agent in the United States for Ray-Gude Mertin Literary Agency, an agency specializing in Spanish, Latin American, and Portuguese authors, which represented such notable writers as 1998 Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago. In 2010, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.