Margarita Saona teaches Latin American literature in the department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. Her scholarly publications include Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea  (2004), Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (2014), and Despadre: masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana (2021). She has also published several books of short fiction and the poetry collection Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (2017), which received the Luces award for the best Peruvian poetry collection of the year. The Ghost of You (2022), her collection of short fiction gathers stories of absence and displacement.  She is currently working on a multi-genre memoir on the experience of heart transplantation and has also published a short essay on the topic entitled De monstruos y cyborgs (2023).