Giannina Braschi (born February 5, 1953) is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), the post-modern poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994) and the philosophical fiction United States of Banana (AmazonCrossing, 2011), which chronicles the Latin American immigrants' experiences in the United States. "

In the 1970s, Giannina Braschi was a student of literature in Madrid, Rome, Paris and London, before she settled in New York City. She obtained a PhD in Hispanic Literatures (State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1980) and has taught at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University, where she served as a Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing (1997). She was a foreign correspondent for Grazie magazine (2001-2002).  As an adolescent in San Juan, Giannina Braschi ranked first place in the U.S. Tennis Association's national tournament in Puerto Rico, becoming the youngest female tennis player to win the Women's Division (1966) on the island. Her father Euripides ("Pilo") Braschi was also a tennis champion. She was also a founding member of the San Juan Children's Choir ("Coro de ninos de San Juan") under music director Evy Lucio and a fashion model during her teen years.  In the 1980s, Braschi's early writings were scholarly in nature and focused on the titans of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as the vanguard poets of Latin America and Spain. She published a book on the Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer and essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Cesar Vallejo, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Federico Garcia Lorca. She later became obsessed with the dramatic and philosophical works of French, German, Polish, Irish, and Russian authors. Though categorized as novels, her later mixed-genre works are experimental in style and format and celebratory of foreign influences. In the 50th anniversary edition of Evergreen Review, Braschi notes that she considers herself "more French than Beckett, Picasso and Gertrude Stein", and believes that she is the "granddaughter of Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud, bastard child of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, half-sister to Heiner Muller, kissing cousin of Tadeusz Kantor, and lover of Witkiewicz".Answer this question using a quote from the following article:

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Braschi's early writings were scholarly in nature and focused on the titans of the Spanish Golden Age,