Barbara Mujica is a novelist, short story writer
and critic. Her latest novel, Sister Teresa, was released in hard cover in 2007 and paperback in 2008. Set against the backdrop of the Counter Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition, it is a fictionalized account of the life of the intrepid mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila. Kirkus Reviews called it “a richly entertaining historical novel… an earthy, humanizing portrait"  (Starred Review). Booklist called it “a brilliant fictional biography.”

Mujica’s previous novel, frida, is an international bestseller that has appeared in seventeen languages. Based on the tumultuous relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, frida was published in hardcover by Overlook Press in 2001 and in paperback by Plume in 2002.

Barbara Mujicas other book-length fiction includes The Deaths of Don Bernardo (novel, 1990), Sanchez across the Street (stories, 1997) and Far from My Mothers Home (stories, 1999). Far from My Mothers Home was published in French in 2005 and is currently being translated into Spanish.
 
Barbara Mujica's short stories have appeared in numerous magazines including The Minnesota Review, Pangolin Papers, and The Literary Review, and anthologies such as Where Angels Glide at Dawn, eds. Lori Carlson and Cnythia Ventura, Intro. Isabel Allende (1990, 1993), What Is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women, ed. Marjorie Agosín (1995), Two Worlds Walking, ed. C. W. Truesdale and Diana Glancy (1994), and The House of Memory, ed. Marjorie Agosin(1999).
 
Mujica has won the Trailblazers Award from Dialogue on Diversity for frida and other writings, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for short fiction, the Pangolin Prize for Best Short Story of the Year (1998), and the E. L. Doctorow International Fiction Competition. She has also won grants and awards from Poets and Writers of New York, the Spanish Government, and other institutions. She is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize for Fiction. She has also won numerous grants and fellowships.
 
Mujica's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Dallas Morning Star, and hundreds of other publications. In 1990 her essay "Bilingualisms Goal" was named one of the best 50 op-eds of the decade by The New York Times. Her latest non-fiction works are Teresa de Ávila: Lettered Woman (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), Teresa de Jesús: Espiritualidad y feminismo (Biblioteca Crítica, 2005), Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia’s Daughters (Yale University Press, 2004), and Hispanomundo (Harcourt College Publishing, 2001). She has edited eight literary anthologies. The most recent are Milenio: Mil años de literatura española (2002), Antología de la literatura española: Siglos XVIII y XIX (1999), and Premio Nóbel: Once grandes escritores del mundo hispánico (1997). Her Antología de la literatura española: Renacimiento y siglo de oro was reprinted in 2008.
 
Barbara Mujica is President Emerita of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater and Editor of Comedia Performance, a journal devoted to early modern Spanish theater. A Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, she writes extensively on Spanish literature, in particular, Teresa de Avila and her articles have appeared in many academic journals.

In 2005 she was editor of the South American theater section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress. For fifteen years she was book review editor of Américas, the cultural magazine of the Organization of American States.  She is director of El Retablo, Georgetown University's Spanish-language theater group.