Iris Mónica Vargas grew up in Barrio Bajuras, Puerto Rico. She has published two volumes of poetry, La última caricia and El libro azul, and received a PEN International Puerto Rico Award for the latter. She has been a translator for Science@NASA and a science writer whose column Ciencia Boricua, for El Nuevo Día, was awarded Best New Column of the Year. She formally trained as a physicist at Universidad de Puerto Rico and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, holds a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and is currently studying medicine at Saint James School of Medicine. Her poetry, essays and, short stories have been published in Letralia, Otro Lunes, Isla Negra, Letras Salvajes, and Revista Fábula, among others.