Cris Lira holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of Georgia. She specializes in Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research focuses on contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature and culture through interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. Her interests include women's writing, representations of women and violence, exile aesthetics, post-dictatorship literature, gender, and memory studies. Her articles have appeared in Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, Revista Mulheres e Literatura, among other journals. In 2022, she co-edited the bilingual poetry collection Raízes: Brazilian Women Poets in Translation (Portuguese/English), published by Venas Abiertas.
Alongside her academic work, Cris Lira is a creative writer whose literary production reflects many of the themes that inform her scholarship. Her most recent poetry book, A casa eterna (2025), was published as part of Collection VI of Mulherio das Letras. In 2026, her bilingual project Escrevivências e [R]esistências: A poesia de autoras negras brasileiras, originally developed with students in the course PORT4060/6060: Poetry of the Portuguese-Speaking World, was published by Venas Abiertas. Her previous book, Fragmentos do interior (2021), is part of the third Mulherio das Letras collection of single-authored books published by Editora Venas Abiertas. In 2020, she published O mundo é esse lugar (The World is Such a Place) as part of the second Mulherio das Letras collection. Her earlier books, No país da infância (My Childhood Country) and Ponte para o poente (Bridge to the Sunset), were both published in 2019 as part of the first Mulherio das Letras collection, which was a finalist for the prestigious Jabuti Literary Prize in 2020. Some of her short stories and poems have also appeared in anthologies such as ¡Basta! 100+ Latinas Against Gender Violence (University of Nevada Press, 2017) and Mulherio pela paz (ABR, 2018).