2011-2012 Writers at Rutgers Reading Series

Fiction from the Caribbean: Cristina Garcia and Tiphanie Yanique

Cristina García is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, just published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was recently published by Akashic Books.  García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into a dozen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others.

Tiphanie Yanique is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. She is the winner of the 2010 Rona Jaffe Prize in Fiction. Her fiction, poetry or essays can be found in the Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies. She has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. Tiphanie is a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.