Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, and the Guardian. He was staff writer at the Village Voice and Latin music columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (Bold Type Press, 2019) Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture (Verso Books, 2018), Living in Spanglish (St. Martins, 2002), The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock (Da Capo Press, 2003). His book Latinx was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2019.
An upcoming book, tentatively titled Nuyorican Dreams, will examine 1970s political and cultural movements like the Young Lords, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and Fania-era salsa to paint the portrait of a revolutionary generation of New York Puerto Ricans. The book will be published by One World, a division of Random House.
Morales is also a poet whose work has appeared in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1993) and various small magazines, and his fiction has appeared in Iguana Dreams (HarperCollins, 1992), and Boricuas (Ballantine, 1994). He has participated in residencies as a member of Nuyorican Poets Café Live, touring as a spoken-word performer in several cities throughout the east coast, in California, Florida, Texas, and Denmark. Morales has appeared on CNN, Democracy Now, HBO Latino, CNN Español, WNBC-TV’s Visiones, WABC’s Tiempo, BBC television and radio, and The Laura Flanders Show, and hosted his own radio show, “Living in Spanglish,” on WBAI-FM in New York from 2015–2018.
Morales is currently a 2022-2023 Mellon Foundation fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, in a cohort of academics, artists, and writers doing work around decolonizing Puerto Rico. Morales was the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship in 1992 to research Latino Theater and from 2006–2007 he was selected for the prestigious Revson Fellowship at Columbia University. While a Revson fellow, he codirected a 50-minute documentary called Whose Barrio? The film was inspired by “Spanish Harlem on His Mind,” an essay published in 2003 in the New York Times and in the anthology New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (NYU Press, 2005). Whose Barrio? premiered in the 2009 New York Latino International Film Festival and won Best Documentary Short at the 2009 Long Island Latino Film Festival.
Morales is a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and John Jay College for Criminal Justice. He has also lectured at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers University.
email contact: spanglishlife@yahoo.com
ED MORALES 
Very glad to find this blog, Ed. I think we corresponded a while back. My full name is Rick Kearns-Morales and I’m half boricua, a freelance writer and poet. Keep up the great work.
Hey Ed, was listening to Nuyorican Soul, then meandered over the Nuryorican Poets Cafe, then decided to Google you and here I am. Glad to know you are doing well. If you get out to SF, look me up.