Authors

Lissette Lendeborg is a Miami-based artist, writer, and filmmaker. She is the author of the chapbook Roots (Or, This May Be Where I Came From) (Finishing Line Press), has had her prose published in Litro magazine, and her poetry published in anthologies such as Poetry Matters, Di Verse City, and Orange Island Review. Having graduated from the filmmaking conservatory of New York Film Academy, she now works to build her craft and artistry to tell stories through screenwriting as well as prose and poetry. Roots is a close look into the inner workings of a young woman on a journey of growth and self-discovery. These poems are tellings of a coming of age. With topics such as romance, heartbreak, faith, depression, and sexuality, they provide an intimate portrayal of the speaker on her journey to adulthood.

Raina J. León, Ph.D., is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, Anaphora, and the Obsidian Foundation, and the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra: (dis)locate, and the chapbooks profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. Her latest work, black god mother this body (Black Freighter Press), is a collection that includes prose poems, collages, and memories about motherhood, particularly Black motherhood, in all its complexity.

David Lerner Schwartz teaches writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a doctoral student. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Ecotone, New Ohio Review, Los Angeles Review, Witness, New York Magazine, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, on Literary Hub, and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by grants and fellowships from UC’s Office of Research, Department of English, and the Niehoff Center for Film & Media Studies; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; St. Albans School, where he served as the 38th writer-in-residence; and the Bennington Writing Seminars, from which he holds an MFA. He has a B.A. from Tufts University and is the fiction editor at Four Way Review.

Dana Levin’s fifth book is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon, 2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Recent books include Banana Palace and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry, and The Yale Review, among other publications. She is a grateful recipient of honors from the NEA, PEN, the Library of Congress, and the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin serves as distinguished writer in residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Now Do You Know Where You Are is a companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. It investigates how great change calls the soul out of the old lyric “to be a messenger – to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin works in various forms, calling on beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers, and religions – convened by Levin’s own spun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality – balancing clear-eyed forensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future.

Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck (Sarabande Books) and their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck (Sarabande Books) and their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. They’ll be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with poet and essayist Su Cho on her collection The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin Books) as part of the Fair’s National Poetry Series program.

Ada Limón became the 24th poet laureate of the United States in July 2022. She is the author of several poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Sharks in the Rivers. Her work also has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street. Limón is the host of the podcast The Slowdown. “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” she writes. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive to the world’s pain and joys and to divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings? In The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions), Limón explores those questions and more as she incorporates others’ stories and ways of knowing, always reaching a place of startling insight. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.

Verónica Linares (La Paz, Bolivia) Narradora, mediadora de lectura, investigadora y profesora de niños. Tiene un máster en Educación en la Universidad de la Sabana, Colombia, y otro en Libros y Literatura infantil y juvenil en la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, España. Además, ha realizado varios cursos y diplomados relacionados con la literatura infantil y juvenil (LIJ). Ha publicado los siguientes libros: Los guantes de Agustina y Matilde, la paloma verdiazul (Editorial 3600, Bolivia), Clemencia, la vaca que quería ser blanca (Norma, Perú y México), Zacarías (La Hoguera, Bolivia; seleccionado entre las trescientas obras infantiles y juveniles latinoamericanas recomendadas por el gobierno argentino para el Plan de lectura 2012), En busca de un caballito de mar (Editorial Gisbert, Bolivia; finalista del concurso Norma-Fundalectura 2008 y elegido entre los trescientos libros recomendados por el gobierno argentino para el Plan de lectura 2012; formó parte de la lista los Mejores libros para niños y jóvenes 2013 del Banco del Libro de Venezuela), El misterio de las ranitas (La Hoguera, Bolivia), Viaje al centro del cielo (Editorial Gisbert, Bolivia), ¿Y Celeste? (Editorial Don Bosco, Bolivia), Anfibius Lunaticus (Editorial Santillana, Bolivia; segundo lugar en VI Premio Nacional de Literatura infantil en su país) y La marca de los reyes (Editorial Gisbert, Bolivia). Pertenece a la Academia Boliviana de Literatura infantil y juvenil desde 2006, de la que es cofundadora. Ha participado como ponente en seminarios y congresos en Bolivia, Perú, Chile y también se dedica a la investigación y la mediación de la LIJ. Participa en la mesa Literatura infantil de Bolivia que forma parte del 9.º Seminario de Literatura infantil y Lectura.

Jeff Lindsay is an American playwright, crime novelist, and the New York Times bestselling author of the eight-part series on the sociopathic vigilante Dexter Morgan. It debuted in 2004 with Darkly Dreaming Dexter, and it’s the basis of the hit Showtime and CBS series Dexter. In Three-Edged Sword: A Novel (Dutton), superthief Riley Wolfe can do it all. He is a master of disguise and can scale a wall and vanish into thin air. He uses these unique talents to rob the richest. But this time, the most powerful have him in their grip. A high-up rogue government agent has abducted the only two people Riley loves, and now he must do the man’s dirty work to set them free. Infiltrating a madman’s Soviet missile silo in one of the world’s most remote places to find a secret on a tiny flash drive is all in a day’s work. But Riley’s never had to race the clock like this. Weaving espionage, thievery, love, and betrayal, Three-Edged Sword twists, turns, and keeps everything on the line until the very end. It looks like this time, the only way out is through.

Anni Liu is a writer, translator, and editor from the Chinese Northwest and the Midwestern United States. Her poems and translations are published or forthcoming in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Two Lines, Pleaides, and Quarterly West, among others. The collection Border Vista (Persea) intimately narrates the experience of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America. In poems that consider migration an ongoing process rather than a finite event, Liu writes exquisitely on fear (useful and paranoid) and agency, loneliness, and the way the violence of the carceral state shapes our most intimate relationships – to each other and to the land. As she does, she revisits moments of unexpected poignancy: searching for turtles in a drainage ditch, picking crabapples along a rural highway, and smelling the namesake flower of her mother, who is half a world away.

E. Lockhart is the author of the New York Times bestseller We Were Liars. She also invented a superhero for DC Comics. Her other books include Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero; Again Again; The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, a National Book Award finalist and a Printz Honor book; and Genuine Fraud, a New York Times bestseller. In Family of Liars: The Prequel to We Were Liars (Delacorte Press), readers visit a windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts where a hungry ocean churns with secrets and sorrow. A fiery, addicted heiress and an irresistible, unpredictable boy are introduced. And a summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes unfolds. Welcome back Sinclair family; you were always liars.

Diego Londoño (Colombia) Periodista, amante y conocedor de la música colombiana, locutor de radio. Crítico musical del periódico El Colombiano y presentador de Radiónica. Colaborador de diversos medios informativos iberoamericanos. Ha publicado Los Yetis. Una bomba atómica go go, Medellín en canciones. El rock como cronista de una ciudad, Rodolfo Aicardi, la historia del ídolo de siempre y Donde nacen las canciones. Viene con Juanes a presentar Juanes. La biografía (Aguilar, Penguin Random House, 2022).

Darío Lopérfido (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1964) Político, promotor cultural y periodista argentino. Se desempeñó como director general y artístico del Teatro Colón desde febrero de 2015 hasta 2016. Fue consultor del Grupo PRISA en Madrid, España, entre 2002 y 2008. Ocupó el cargo de secretario de Cultura y Comunicaciones de Argentina entre 1999 y 2001, el de secretario de Cultura de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires entre 1997 y 1999 y el de subsecretario de Acciones culturales de Buenos Aires en 1996. Dirigió el Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, dependiente de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, entre 1992 y 1999, y el Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires en sus ediciones de 1997, 1999, 2011 y 2013. Trabajó como periodista especializado en arte y cultura en la Revista Teatro y en las emisoras de radio FM Rock & Pop y La Red entre 1985 y 1989. Es coautor, con Alejandro Félix Capato, de los libros Derechos culturales en el Mercosur y Legislación cultural en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Participa en el panel Cultura abierta o cancelación organizado por la Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa.

Bojan Louis is a member of the Navajo Nation – Diné of the Naakai Dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of a book of poetry, Currents, which received an American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona. His fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Numéro Cinq Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review; and his nonfiction work in Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in the gritty Sinking Bells: Stories (Graywolf Press) depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. An ex-con hired to fix a school bus for a couple living off the grid finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician plans to take his young nephew on a mountain hike, but plans go awry thanks to an untrustworthy new co-worker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions. In these stories, characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses and endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.

Jacky Lumarque has been the rector of the Université Quisqueya since 2007. He previously served as president of the Regional Conference of Rectors, Presidents and Directors of Universities in the Caribbean (CORPUCA) from 2012 to 2019. Lumarque was also a member of the board of directors of the Francophone University Association (AUF), in which he also served in the associative council and the management committee, from 2008 to 2017. Under the administration of René Préval, Lumarque coordinated the working group on education and training (GTEF), providing policy recommendations directly to the president.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado is the author of the poetry collection Matria, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is co-director of Editorial Kalina and editor of Puntos de Fuga/Vanishing Points (Editorial Kalina, 2017), a bilingual anthology of contemporary Salvadoran prose. She lives in Miami and San Salvador, El Salvador. When COVID-19 broke out and the United States closed the border to travel, Lytton Regalado was separated from her family in El Salvador. Written entirely during the lockdown, the poems in Relinquenda (Beacon Press) are a meditation on illness, the passing of her father, and the renewed significance of community. The central part of the collection focuses on her father during his six-year struggle with cancer and explores how it might serve as a mirror and warning. Other poems address what it means for daughters, mothers, and wives to care for one another as reflected in her relationships with the men in her life. Situated in the tropical landscapes of Miami and El Salvador, the poems also negotiate the meaning of home, reflecting on immigration and the ties between the U.S. and El Salvador 30 years after her birth country’s decadelong civil war.

Kellie Magnus is a writer and development consultant, living in Kingston, Jamaica. Her passions are global Black creativity and philanthropy. She is the Jamaica country lead for Fight for Peace, an NGO that supports young people living in communities with high levels of violence to realize their full potential. The program brings together more than 40 local partners to co-deliver programs for youth, their parents and organizations that serve youth. Outside of work, Magnus writes a series on creativity, Jamaican creatives and the creative economy. She spends most of her free time interviewing and writing about creatives, running, reading. and traveling around Jamaica. Her writing has appeared in local and regional publications, and she has authored more than 15 children’s books, several of which are included in the Jamaican school system under the Literacy 123 program spearheaded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information. She currently serves on the National Commission on Violence Prevention, coordinated by the Office of the Prime Minister. She is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities.

Kekla Magoon is the author of many novels and nonfiction books for young readers, including The Season of Styx Malone, The Rock and the River, How It Went Down, and the Robyn Hoodlum Adventure series. She has received four Coretta Scott King Honors, the Walter Award Honor, and an NAACP Image Award, and has long been listed for the National Book Award. Chester Keene, the lead character in Magoon’s YA adventure Chester Keene Cracks the Code (Wendy Lamb Books), takes great comfort in his routines. After-school Monday to Thursday is bowling; Friday is laser tag. But Chester’s very special thing is the secret spy messages from his dad, who must be on covert government assignments, which is why Chester’s never met him. Then one day, Chester’s classmate, Skye, approaches him with a complex puzzle-solving mission. Skye is a helpful partner and good company, even if her freewheeling ways are disruptive to Chester’s carefully built schedule. As Chester and Skye get closer to their final clue, they discover the key to their spy assignment: They must stop a heist. But cracking this code may mean finding out things are not always what they seem.

Jamil Mahuad (Loja, Ecuador, 1949) Escritor, abogado y político. Es doctor en Jurisprudencia por la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador y obtuvo la maestría en Administración Pública en la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy de la Universidad de Harvard (1989). Ha sido ministro de Trabajo (1983-1984), diputado del Congreso Nacional (1986-1988 y 1990-1992), alcalde de Quito (1992-1998) y presidente del Ecuador (1998-2000). Durante su mandato presidencial suscribió el Tratado de Paz definitivo con Perú, dolarizó la economía ecuatoriana, creó el Bono Solidario y declaró zona intangible a más de un millón de hectáreas de la zona del parque Yasuní y de la reserva de Cuyabeno, por lo que su gobierno recibió el premio Regalo a la Tierra del Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza en 1999. Ha estado vinculado con la Universidad de Harvard desde el año 2000, donde enseña negociación, liderazgo y gobernabilidad, y ha sido fellow de varios institutos. Es miembro de los directorios de varias organizaciones dedicadas a promover la paz y la democracia, y ha sido conferencista invitado por organismos públicos y privados como el Banco Mundial y la Organización de Jóvenes Presidentes (YPO, por sus siglas en inglés). Es coautor, con Roger Fischer y Daniel Shapiro, del libro Las emociones en la negociación (2005). Mahuad presenta en la feria el título Así dolarizamos el Ecuador. Memorias de un acierto histórico en América Latina, publicado en 2021 bajo el sello Ariel, de la Editorial Planeta. En la primera parte del libro el expresidente de Ecuador hace un recuento histórico y político de los hechos que llevaron a dolarizar la economía ecuatoriana, lo que se complementa con los ensayos de su equipo que aparecen en la segunda parte.

Crystal Maldonado is an author of YA books. Her debut novel, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, is a New England Book Award winner, a Cosmopolitan Best New Book, and a POPSUGAR Best New YA Novel. She works in higher ed marketing by day and as a writer by night. Her work has been published in Latina, on BuzzFeed, and in The Hartford Courant. In No Filter and Other Lies (Holiday House), golden-haired Max Monroe has a picture-perfect existence: beauty, friends, and many followers. Except it’s all fake. “Max” is actually Kat Sanchez, a quiet and sarcastic 17-year-old living in drab Bakersfield, California. There’s nothing glamorous about her existence but she thrives as Max: doling out advice, sharing beautiful photos, networking with fans, even finding a gorgeous follower named Elena. But the closer Elena and “Max” get, the more Kat feels she has to keep up the façade. “Max” is the first time people have really listened to what Kat has to say – and after a lifetime of invisibility can she really give that up? But when one of Kat’s posts goes viral and reaches the girl in her photos, her real and fake worlds come crashing down around her.

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, and The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. His work has been published in various publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times, where he spent two years as a contributing editor. In The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin Press), Mallaby tells the story of Silicon Valley’s dominant venture capital firms, and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy. It’s a story of iconic triumphs and infamous disasters, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the silly money that fed the hubris at WeWork and Uber. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world.

Shahriar Mandanipour is an exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction includes two novels – Moon Brow and Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in English – and the story collection Seasons of Purgatory (Bellevue Literary Press). In 2006, Mandanipour moved to the United States, where in 2021, he became a citizen. In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from various perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. Their debut novel Summer Sons (Tordotcom) is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic, and their work has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare. Mandelo will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with Andrew Joseph White, the queer, trans author of the novel Hell Followed with Us (Peachtree Teen).

Sarah Manguso is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Her nonfiction books include 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds Of Decay. Her work is regularly featured in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. In Very Cold People: A Novel (Hogarth), Manguso writes about Ruthie, growing up in – and out of – the suffocating constraints of a very old and very cold small town. Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families – the Cabots, the Lowells – by the tail end of the 20th century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood, but one of swap meets, factory seconds, and powdered milk. But as she grows older, she learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm. Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out of it alive.

Marie Marquardt is the author of the YA novels Dream Things True, The Radius of Us, and Flight Season. She has also published articles and co-authored two nonfiction books about Latin American immigration to the U.S. South. Does My Body Offend You? (Knopf Books for Young Readers), co-authored with Mayra Cuevas, tells the story of Malena Rosario and Ruby McAllister. When Malena – a Puerto Rican girl stuck in Florida after Hurricane María destroyed her home – goes to school bra-less after a bad sunburn and is humiliated by the school administration into covering up, Ruby just can’t keep quiet about it. She’s a Seattle girl with a reputation as the school’s outspoken feminist. Malena and Ruby didn’t expect to be the leaders of a school rebellion, but that’s where they find themselves. Still, they’ll have to face their insecurities, biases, and privileges if they want to stand up for their ideals and – ultimately – themselves.

Robert Martin is the founder of TheIndependentBookseller.com, a free resource for independent booksellers. He has worked for regional and national bookselling trade associations and consults with both established independent bookstores and entrepreneurs looking to enter the market. He is based in Minneapolis.

Inés Martín Rodrigo (Madrid, España, 1983) Escritora y periodista. Licenciada en Periodismo por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Desde 2008 trabaja en el área de Cultura del periódico ABC y está considerada como una de las periodistas culturales de referencia en España. Es autora de la ficción biográfica Azules son las horas (2016), de la antología de entrevistas a escritoras Una habitación compartida (2020) y del cuento infantil Giselle (2020), basado en el ballet del mismo nombre. Ha prologado obras de autores como David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf o Carmen Laforet. En 2019 fue seleccionada por la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID) para el programa “10 de 30”, que cada año reconoce a los mejores escritores españoles menores de cuarenta años. Su novela Las formas del querer ha sido galardonada con el Premio Nadal 2022, publicado por el sello Destino, de la editorial Planeta, y es este el libro que viene a compartir con el público de la ciudad, en el que cuenta las historias de una familia española en los años que van de la guerra civil hasta la transición democrática.

Kelly Martínez-Grandal (La Habana, Cuba, 1980) Poeta y narradora. Vive en Miami. Es licenciada en Artes y magíster en Literatura comparada, ambos títulos otorgados por la Universidad Central de Venezuela, donde también fue profesora. En Caracas, además, trabajó para distintos museos e instituciones culturales. Ha publicado los poemarios Medulla Oblongata (2017), Paria (2019), Zugunruhe (2020, edición bilingüe; Medalla de Plata en el International Latino Book Awards 2021) y Una luna anacoreta (2021) y el libro de cuentos Muerte con campanas (2021). Participa en la mesa Hablemos Escritoras.

Natalia Martínez-Kalínina was born in Cuba and grew up in Havana, Moscow, and Mexico City before being granted asylum in the United States. She is an organizational psychologist and holds degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. She works primarily at the intersection of entrepreneurship, technology, economic progress, and urban development, and is deeply passionate about connecting across geographies, access gaps, and narratives of otherness. Most recently, Martínez-Kalínina is founding Principal at NMK Group, where she advises clients on economic development, human capital design, and impact strategy. Previously, she was the founding general manager and Latin America lead for Cambridge Innovation Center and the chief innovation officer at Roots of Hope. Martínez-Kalínina has also been the founder of Awesome Foundation, Aminta Ventures, and Immigrant Powered, among other organizations. She has been a contributor to outlets such as HuffPost, the World Economic Forum, Mic, La Nación, and the Miami Herald.

Julia Mascioli is the deputy director of the Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop. She oversees all programming for Free Minds members incarcerated in the District of Columbia Jail, juvenile detention facility, and federal prisons across the country. She is a co-editor of the anthology When You Hear Me (You Hear Us): Voices on Youth Incarceration, and her short fiction has been published in several literary magazines, including the Bellevue Literary Review, Witness, and Bellingham Review.