Books

The Girl With The Pen: A Poetic Journey is the debut poetry collection of Marilou Rivera, a Puerto Rican-American educator and writer born and raised in the Bronx, New York. What began as a teenage love of writing was nearly silenced when a flood destroyed years of saved poems — but the words would not stay lost. In the summer of 2024, Marilou returned to her craft and began rebuilding what grief had washed away, poem by poem, memory by memory.

This collection is both a restoration and a reckoning: 150 poems gathered, lost, and faithfully rewritten. Through verses of longing, resilience, faith, and womanhood, Marilou invites readers into the rooms where her stories were born — and the quiet courage it took to walk back inside them.

Marilou holds an Associate of Arts in Journalism, a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Media, and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Education. Whether she is teaching in the classroom or writing by lamplight, she writes to remind others that no dream is too broken to be made beautiful again.