About

Caridad De La Luz is an Emmy-winning poet known as LA BRUJA who in 2022 was appointed Executive Director of the NUYORICAN POETS CAFE where she began her career in 1996.

In 2023, she helped secure a renovation project of $24 million for the Nuyorican Poets cafe located on the Lower East Side. This phase of closure from 2024-2026 is being called Nuyoricanstruction to completely renew all five floors of the building.

She was the winner of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for 2019-2020 and a 2021 David Prize finalist.

Caridad balances a life of leadership, activism, spirituality, education and art with performances in successful Off-Broadway musicals such as I LIKE IT LIKE THAT. She has been one of America’s leading spoken word poets for over 20 years and has received the Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award from The Bronx Historical Society and was honored as A Bronx Living Legend by The Bronx Music Heritage Center. She was presented with a Citation of Merit from The Bronx Borough President in 2014 and named “Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know”. The NY Times called her a “juggernaut” after her first off-Broadway run of the original musical, BOOGIE RICAN BLVD., which celebrates its quinceańera this year with a published libretto that includes photography of the live production at Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.

Her acting career has taken her from the stage to film: appearing in numerous movies such as BAMBOOZLED, DOWN TO THE BONE, EL VACILON and GUN HILL ROAD. Internationally introduced to the world in Russell Simmons’ DEF POETRY JAM on HBO, her career has spanned from spoken word to television, from Hip Hop albums BRUJALICIOUS and FOR WITCH IT STANDS to documentaries like Hip Hop Hope and La Bruja: A Witch from the Bronx.

Since 2015, she has been cultivating her own art space in the Soundview section of The Bronx called EL GARAGE on the ancestral land of the Siwanoy First Nation, once called Snakapins meaning the land between two waters. Along with Pepatian.org where she has been a collaborator and consultant since 2009, their annual Bronx Indigenous Futurisms gatherings just marked their seventh year.

She began developing a new one-woman show called FROM POOR TO RICO, after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico and displaced all of her elders in 2017. This work in progress pays respect to the people lost and those still fighting the stranglehold of colonization on and off the island. It includes original music and visuals from her family’s archive of Puerto Rico in the 1970s. She has received the Bronx Cultural Visions Fund recently, a $20K grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts to finalize and present the production by 2025.

For more, follow @LaBrujaNYC on Instagram/Twitter/TikTok.