Iris Morales

Iris Morales is a human rights activist, educator, and attorney. Her work focuses on issues of racial justice, women’s rights, and the decolonization of Puerto Rico. She brings her activism to projects with young people, educators, and media producers and has built organizations dedicated to grassroots organizing, community empowerment, and media education. Her love of storytelling and history led her to create Red Sugarcane Press to publish books about the BIPOC and Puerto Rican experience in the Americas.

Currently, Ms. Morales is a member of the advisory board of the Instituto de Formación Política de Mijente, a political home for Latinx and Chicanx people who seek racial, economic, gender, and climate justice. She is also a board member of Todos Arte, overseeing the grants program of La Borinqueña, the Puerto Rican comic book superheroine, supporting grassroots community projects in Puerto Rico.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Morales was a leading member of the New York Young Lords, serving as  Deputy Minister of Education and cofounder of the Women's Caucus and Women's Union. She documents these experiences in the documentary, !Palante Siempre Palante!, which continues to be screened in venues across the United States and Puerto Rico. Her writings about the Young Lords have appeared in books such as Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, among others.

Ms. Morales is a graduate of New York University School of Law and earned an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College in New York.

 For more information go to imoralesnyc.wordpress.com