Dr Anna Deeny Morales is a Fellow in the Humanities at the Center for Latin American Studies, Georgetown University. A Latina writer, Dr Deeny Morales joined the Trinity Long Room Hub for a two-month fellowship during October and November 2025 where she worked on her project ‘Home Come Home’, a libretto covering themes of youth depression and suicide ideation.
In a recent in-conversation discussion, Dr Deeny Morales told her Trinity collaborator Professor Rigaki, about how her Latina background has informed her work across poetry, translation and opera. She spoke of the influences of her mother – a poet and public schoolteacher – and the performance of poetry in her household. Summers were spent in Puerto Rico, she said. Here music was also an important part of her life. “We grew up performing in the family.”
Anna Deeny Morales and Evangelia Rigaki
Her paternal side of the family is Irish, she told Dr Rigaki, as she explained how her fellowship in Trinity – and in Ireland – posed a “personal challenge” and meant “facing an enormous silence” in her family’s past.
“In coming here, there was another very personal challenge. My grandfather was the son of this couple from Donegal, it was very difficult for him that their son married someone from Puerto Rico.”
But she was interested in the story of emigration from this side of the family, and how her great grandparents had left Ireland in the late 19th century as minors—a “simple gesture of courage had set the destiny of my life.”
In speaking about this and about her acclaimed opera ZAVALA-ZAVALA which deals with family separation at the Southern US border, she said she is “not interested in unique stories” but “common stories.”
Touching on the challenges of showing this production from the first Trump administration to the second (“in the first Trump administration we didn’t have the sense of censorship”), and the vast work she has done in translation of Latin American poetry, Dr Deeny Morales returned to the theme of her current project ‘Home Come Home.’
“’Home Come Home’ is a story about a mom searching for her child who suffers from depression”, Dr Deeny Morales said as she highlighted the research that informs the libretto and youth depression and suicide ideation as a problem that affects many countries worldwide. The opera has been commissioned for the 2027-28 performance season with the IN Series, Washington, DC.
Informed by the field of psychology and ideas of parental empathy, the libretto also looks to the Irish tradition as Dr Deeny Morales takes cues from the use of the fantastical in Irish traditional songs. Dr Deeny Morales explained how the libretto will look at how the mother “engages a fantastical world” in the search for her child.
During her fellowship, Dr Deeny Morales has engaged with the wider community in the Trinity Long Room Hub, including fellow visiting researchers, Early Career Researchers and colleagues in the School of Creative Arts, including Dr Nicole Grimes and Dr Evangelia Rigaki. In addition to drawing on archives here in Trinity College’s Library and the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dr Deeny Morales has also visited Derry, Rathmullan, Doolin, Wexford, and Tuam, Co. Galway where an excavation is currently being carried out on the site of the former Mother and Baby Home.
Her monography Other Solitudes: Essays on Consciousness and Poetry, is forthcoming in 2027.
Anna Deeny Morales is a US-based Latina writer who grew up between Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. Her works in opera and poetry consider everyday family love and children; modes of empathy; patterns of political, legal, and religious violence; strategies of disappearance; and family separation. Her operas have been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She received a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican theater, from Dartmouth College; and a BA in English Literature with a minor in Piano Performance from Shepherd University. After college, she studied theater and directing at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica, Silvio d'Amico, in Rome, Italy. A Fellow in the Humanities at the Center for Latin American Studies, Georgetown University, Deeny Morales has lectured at Dartmouth College and Harvard University, where she was named an "Inspiring Latina" by Latinas Unidas and received two Derek Bok Excellence in Teaching Awards.