Issue 14
Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several books about the island. The Poet Slave of Cuba, A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Henry Holt & Co., 2006), a young adult book written entirely in free verse, has received the Americas Award and an International Reading Association Award, and is a finalist for a PEN Center USA Literary Award. It just received the Pura Belpre Award, the American Library Association’s highest honor for Hispanic literature for young people. Short works appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Caribbean Writer, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Nimrod, and Poetry Salzburg. Margarita’s next book is The Surrender Tree, forthcoming from Henry Holt and Co. in April 2008.