Fictional avatars of colonial Mexican poet, nun, and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) began to proliferate during her lifetime. Like other learned women writers of the early modern period, Sor Juana was awarded the honorific titles of “Tenth Muse” and “Phoenix,” both denoting a status other than human. The brilliance that brought her to the Viceregal court of New Spain was regarded as freakish, and she knew it: Pedro del Santísimo Sacramento, a Spanish cleric who wrote one of the numerous encomiastic prologues to the second volume of her works, published in Barcelona in 1692, called her “Monstruo de las mujeres y prodigio mexicano” (“Monster among women and Mexican prodigy”; Sor Juana, 1995, p. 26). Mexican poet Felipe Luis Fabré cites this encomium in the title poem of his verse biofiction Sor Juana y otros monstruos, taking the pejorative meaning to a violent conclusion in which a monstrous Sor Juana slaughters the scholars who quibble about her life and her writing; her relationship to her patron, the Condesa de Paredes; and the reasons for her silence in the last years of her life. In her wake, the monstrous Sor Juana leaves a trail of unfinished blood-spattered dissertations and contentious treatises, and she will hover above us, open her wings like opening a book, “y remontará la noche y ascenderá, / bellísima y monstruosa, / una vez más hasta las esferas” (“and she will fly above the night, ascending – / gorgeous and monstrous – / once more toward the spheres”; pp. 16–17).