Authors

Richard Blanco, named Miami-Dade County’s very first poet laureate earlier this year, was selected by President Barack Obama as the country’s fifth inaugural presidential poet and is the author of two memoirs and four poetry collections. He is also a professor at Florida International University and a public speaker. In How to Love a Country: Poems (Beacon Press), Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved social and political matters that affect us all. The poems form a mosaic of varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. These poems interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, note our flaws, celebrate our ideals and hold on to our hopes. America, they suggest, could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love.

Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of the previous collection Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir, and the chapbooks Chorus for the Kill, Susurration, Letters to Joan, and A Season for Speaking, part of the Robin Becker series. She is also the founder and director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana, a literary review. In Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) she writes, “If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger,” a reasonable creed for navigating a life demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Explored here are the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers, and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. Infertility and motherhood, memory and loss, and love and infidelity are also examined, and she conjures poems from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society website, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Isaac Blum is a writer and educator. He’s taught English at several colleges and universities and Orthodox Jewish and public schools. The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen (Philomel Books) is his debut novel. Hoodie Rosen’s life isn’t that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie’s world hasn’t changed that much. He’s got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren’t happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in, but that’s not Hoodie’s problem. That is, until he meets and falls for Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary – who happens to be the daughter of the obstinate mayor trying to keep Hoodie’s community out of the town. And things only get more complicated when a series of antisemitic crimes hit Tregaron, and they quickly escalate to deadly violence. Suddenly, Hoodie’s community turns on him for siding with the enemy, and he finds himself caught between his first love and the only world he’s ever known.

Alex Boersma is a Canadian scientific illustrator. Her work ranges from scientific figures for research papers to editorial illustrations and animation. Articles on her research have appeared in multiple news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Nature, and BBC News. In the sweeping nonfiction picture book The Whale Who Swam Through Time: A Two-Hundred-Year Journey in the Arctic (Roaring Brook Press), Boersma and co-author Nick Pyenson explore the 200-year lifespan of a bowhead whale and the changing environment that surrounds her – from peace and solitude to oil rigs and cruise liners. The journey begins with the birth of a bowhead whale, the longest-living mammal in the world. With gorgeous, detailed, and striking illustrations, this well-researched and thoughtfully curated nonfiction story captures the natural world’s magic and beauty while providing a thoughtful account of how humans have impacted our changing ecosystems – and a call to action to protect the environment.

From age 12, libraries were Ellen Book’s destiny. The Miami-Dade Public Library System hired her in 1987 as a business and science specialist before she ascended into branch management. Volunteer efforts include Dade County Library Association president 2010-2012, South Miami Rotary Club president 2005-2006, and assistant district governor 2007-2009. She coordinated 27,000 dictionary giveaways from 2007-2015, delivering them countywide at student assemblies. The city of South Miami proclaimed May 2, 2006, as "Ellen Book Day," the League of Women Voters named her 2014 Community Activist of the Year, and she was profiled in Community News’ 2021 Women’s History Month issue.

Sarah Booker is an educator and literary translator working from Spanish to English. She has translated novels by Gabriela Ponce and Cristina Rivera Garza, and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her work has also been published in journals such as The Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:AM Magazine, Nashville Review, and Translation Review. In Jawbone, six girls at a private Catholic high school in Ecuador turn to the occult in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of their leader’s invention. This ominous novel explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

Juan Carlos Botero (Bogotá, Colombia, 1960) Narrador y periodista. Estudió literatura en las universidades de Los Andes, Javeriana y Harvard. Ha sido columnista de La Prensa, El Tiempo y El Espectador. Su primer libro, Las semillas del tiempo. Epífanos, donde reúne textos breves, apareció en 1991. En 1998 publicó Las ventanas y las voces, una colección de siete relatos, y en 1994, Virgilio Barco y los medios de comunicación. En 2002 presentó La fiesta y otros cuentos y también su primera novela, La sentencia, traducida al alemán. En 2006, dio a conocer su segunda novela, titulada El arrecife. En 2007 publicó El idioma de las nubes (ocho textos de arte y literatura). En 2010 vio la luz El arte de Fernando Botero, publicado por Ediciones El Viso, España. Obtuvo el Premio de cuento Juan Rulfo 1986 con “El encuentro” y, en 1990, ganó el XIX Concurso Latinoamericano de Cuento, en México, con “El descenso”. Ha dictado conferencias y publicado cientos de artículos, y sus cuentos han aparecido en varias antologías internacionales. Botero llega a la Feria del Libro de Miami con Los hechos causales, una novela publicada por Penguin Random House, que transcurre entre los años que van de 1980 a 1990, una de las etapas más violentas de Colombia.

Marie Brenner is the author of more than half a dozen books and a writer at large for Vanity Fair. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker, a contributing editor at New York, and has won numerous awards for her reporting around the world. Her exposé of the tobacco industry was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider. She also produced the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? COVID-19 arrived in New York City in the spring of 2020. As America’s largest metropolis engaged in a war against the virus, it became apparent that the death count could be in the hundreds of thousands. Brenner had unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, and in The Desperate Hours: One Hospital’s Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic’s Front Lines (Flatiron Books), she takes readers inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics, providing extraordinary witness to the front line of the war. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women – doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers – coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they love.

Nick Brooks is a writer and filmmaker who in 2016 created and launched the children’s books series The Adventures of Yani, read in schools across the country. His short film Hoop Dreamin’ earned him the George Lucas Scholar Award and was a finalist in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Film Fest. His short film Bee won the James Bridges and Jack Larson Award for writing and directing and premiered at the American Black Film Festival. In Nothing Interesting Ever Happens to Ethan Fairmont (Union Square Kids), Brooks’ middle-grade novel debut, self-proclaimed genius inventor Ethan Fairmont runs into an abandoned car factory to avoid a local bully and stumbles across his ex-best friend Kareem, new kid Juan Carlos, and an extraterrestrial visitor. Cheese (the alien) is stuck on Earth in need of some serious repairs, spicy snacks, and total secrecy. Then mysterious agents descend on Ferrous City to search for Cheese. With time running out and their families and friends in potential danger, can Ethan, Kareem, and Juan Carlos pull off an intergalactic rescue before they’re all found out?

David S. Brown is the author of several books, including The Last American Aristocrat, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Brown’s timely The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson (Scribner) positions the seventh U.S. president firmly in the forefront of the country’s populist tradition. Jackson rose from rural poverty to become the dominant figure in American politics between Jefferson and Lincoln. His reputation, however, defies easy description. A self-defined champion of “farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” Jackson railed against the established ruling order – fostering a brand of democracy that struck a chord with the common man – while also taking a prominent role in removing Native American peoples from their ancestral lands. Brown examines Jackson’s public career, including the momentous Battle of New Orleans, the far-reaching Bank War, Jackson’s marriage to an already married woman, and his deadly duel with a Nashville dandy, and analyzes his magnetic hold on much of the country at the time. The First Populist connects Jackson and his legacy to a history of division, dissent, and partisanship that has come to define our current times.

Jenny Brown is the senior editor of Shelf Awareness. She grew up in Athena and John Rollins Bookstores and the Kalamazoo Public Library in Michigan. She has served in editorial roles at Harper and Knopf, edited reviews at Publishers Weekly and has been the librarian at Bank Street College of Education.

Kathy Buccio is a TV host, lifestyle expert, and producer with over 20 years of TV experience. She has contributed to shows such as The Today Show, Telemundo’s Un Nuevo Dia, and Acceso Total, and is a host at South Florida PBS Health Channel. She also contributes to various publications and outlets, including People, Southern Living, Ocean Drive, Miami.com, Gotham, and Vogue en Español.

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A law professor, she was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. In By Hands Now Known (W. W. Norton & Company), Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. She maps the criminal legal system in the mid-20th-century South, from rendition – the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens – to the outsized role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy. In doing so, she traces a vivid line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, Burnham reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been told.

Jessie Burton is the author of The Miniaturist: A Novel, The Muse: A Novel, and The Confession, and is both a Sunday Times No. 1 and New York Times bestselling author. Her first children’s story, The Restless Girls, was published in 2018. Set in Amsterdam in 1705, The House Fortune: A Novel (Bloomsbury Publishing) introduces us to Thea Brandt. She is coming of age, trying to grapple with her family’s secrets and her identity as a young Dutch African woman. She’s drawn to the theater and an artistic life, but her family is in serious financial decline. Thea’s mother died in labor, but her family refuses to share the details of the story with her. Aunt Nella believes the solution to Thea’s problems is to find her a husband, and an unexpected invitation to Amsterdam’s most exclusive ball seems like a golden opportunity. But someone out there has another fate in mind for the family – and perhaps the new beginning Thea seeks won’t depend on a man. The House of Fortune is a novel about love and obsession, family and loyalty, and the fantastic power of secrets.

Fernando Butazzoni (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1953) Narrador, ensayista, periodista, guionista cinematográfico y dramaturgo. Su debut literario se produjo en 1979 con la colección de relatos Los días de nuestra sangre. Ha escrito libros de crónicas y reportajes, un ensayo sobre el Conde de Lautréamont y una decena de novelas, entre ellas, El tigre y la nieve (1986), Príncipe de la muerte (1997) y Las cenizas del Cóndor (2014). También ha escrito varios guiones de películas entre los que se destacan Un lugar lejano (2009), Esclavo de Dios (2013) y Tamara (2016). Por el conjunto de su obra ha recibido numerosos premios y distinciones tanto en Uruguay como en el extranjero. En la Feria del Libro de Miami Butazzoni comparte con el público Las cenizas del Cóndor, Penguin Random House, 2021, novela inspirada en acontecimientos reales ocurridos en Uruguay durante la dictadura militar.

Jaime Cabrera González (Barranquilla, Colombia) Narrador y periodista. Reside en Miami Beach desde 1992. Fue profesor universitario en Colombia e Israel. Ha sido jefe de redacción y editor de varios medios informativos de la Florida. Ha publicado los libros de cuentos Miss Blues 104˚F, Textos sueltos bajo palabra/Autobiografía de los sueños y Como si nada pasara. Algunas de sus narraciones aparecen en las antologías: 20 narradores colombianos en USA, Cuentos cortos del Caribe colombiano, Antología del cuento caribeño, Cuentos sin cuenta, Cita de seis-letras en la diáspora, Veinticinco cuentos barranquilleros y Manojo de sueños, entre otras. Ha hecho parte de colecciones de no ficción tales como: Miami (Un)plugged, Cronistas del Caribe colombiano y Gabito nuestro de cada día. Dirige, desde 2015, el Taller de escritura creativa de la Miami Beach Regional Library. Los trabajos de dicho taller fueron publicados bajo el título de Los convidados del sábado. Volumen I. En la feria Cabrera presenta En un bosque de la China, narración en que convergen cuentos, microrrelatos, viñetas literarias, anécdotas, recuerdos, letras de canciones... y todo esto sazonado con humor e imaginación. El libro ha sido publicado por Fairgreen Editores, en Miami Beach, Florida.

Ada Calhoun is the New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Why We Can’t Sleep. She has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. After stumbling upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun. But the deeper she dove, the more she had to face – not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own. Her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press) weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond, and explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents yet fear what that might cost us.

Kacen Callender was born and raised in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. He is the bestselling and award-winning author of the middle-grade novels Hurricane Child and King and the Dragonflies, the YA novels This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story and Felix Ever After, and the adult novel Queen of the Conquered and its forthcoming sequel, King of the Rising. Lark Winters, a title character of Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution (Amulet Books), wants to be a writer, and for now, that means posting on their social media accounts. When former best friend Kasim accidentally posts a thread on Lark’s Twitter declaring his love for a secret, unrequited crush, Lark decides to take the fall to protect Kasim. It seems like a great idea initially – but living a lie and the judgment of thousands of internet strangers takes a toll. Lark tries their best to be perfect at all costs, but nothing seems good enough for the anonymous hordes – or for Kasim, who is growing closer to Lark, just like it used to be between them. In the end, Lark must embrace their right to their messy emotions and learn how to be in love.

Julio Capó Jr. is an associate professor of history and the deputy director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University. He is the award-winning author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 and was curator of the Queer Miami: A History of LGBTQ Communities exhibition at HistoryMiami Museum. He serves as an associate editor of the Made by History section of The Washington Post and has held fellowships at Yale University and the University of Sydney.

Scott Carney is an investigative journalist, anthropologist, and author of The New York Times bestseller What Doesn’t Kill Us. He spent six years living in South Asia as a contributing editor for Wired and writer for Mother Jones, NPR, Discover Magazine, Fast Company, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. His other books include The Red Market, The Enlightenment Trap and The Wedge. Co-written with Jason Miklian, Ph.D., The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (Ecco) tells the dramatic story of how a storm sparked a country to a liberation war in what is now Bangladesh. In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with Earth’s most densely populated coastline, East Pakistan in the Bay of Bengal. In just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. Pakistan was then on the brink of a historic election. The fallout from the storm’s impact ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery. In The Vortex, Carney and Miklian take us deep into the story, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it.

Jose “Fat Joe” Cartagena is a rapper, actor, and entrepreneur. He released his first solo album, Represent, in 1993, founded the Terror Squad record label, and is perhaps best known for his platinum-selling album Jealous Ones Still Envy (JOSE) and hits like “Lean Back,” “What’s Luv?,” and “All the Way Up.” In The Book of Jose: A Memoir (‎Roc Lit 101), written with journalist and entrepreneur Shaheem Reid, the story of the hip-hop legend – who came of age in New York’s South Bronx during its darkest years of drugs, violence, and abandonment – unfolds. Across its pages is a tale of how he navigated that traumatizing landscape until he found a path to a different life through art, friendship, luck, and will. He faced the grim choice that defined a generation: to become predator or prey. He was both a hustler roaming record stores looking for beats and a budding rapper with a violent rep, until he was shot and almost killed. The Book of Jose is a thought-provoking story about a generation of survivors, the life-and-death choices they had to make, the friends they lost and mourned, and the lives they created from the ruins.

Mario Cartaya is the founder and principal owner of Cartaya and Associates Architects. His work has been recognized in several magazine and newspaper articles and cover stories. Born in Havana in 1951, he and his family immigrated to the United States in 1959. In 2019, his life’s story and architectural designs were entered into the U.S. Library of Congress. In Journey Back into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints (Xlibris Us), Cartaya travels to his birthplace for the first time to reclaim his Cuban childhood memories, original identity, and a once-promised destiny. He searches for “the now faded footprints I once left behind in the homes, school, and playgrounds of the first nine years of my life,” honors relatives he never saw again, and meets family members he never knew. Cartaya aims at breaching “the subconscious vault [he] once built to store the difficult memories of a childhood usurped, destiny denied, and loving family forever separated by geopolitical events.” “By achieving purity of heart, reconciliation […],” he argues, “We can evolve into better versions of ourselves.”

Pablo Cartaya is an author, screenwriter, speaker, and occasional actor. He wrote The Epic Fail for Arturo Zamora; Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish; and Each Tiny Spark. In The Last Beekeeper (HarperCollins), Cartaya writes about a world facing destruction by climate change and those who profit from it. Bees are central to a rebuilding world, and Yolanda Cicerón, a girl who knows that nature is something to be feared, will fight to save the last known beehive from extinction. Life in the Valley is brutal and harsh, and Yoly dreams of leaving her farm to live in Silo, the most advanced town for miles around. But before she can do that, Yoly must prove she belongs in a place that only welcomes the smartest and most useful. She’s well on her way until she discovers that her family can no longer afford her schooling. Forced to take matters into her own hands, the closer she gets to securing her future, the more she uncovers the dangers inside Silo’s walls, dangers that threaten the entire Valley. As she cracks open long-guarded secrets, Yoly finds herself in grave peril, and the only chance of surviving may lie in rediscovering a long-extinct species – the honeybee.

Robert Casper is the head of poetry and literature at the Library of Congress. He previously worked at the Poetry Society of America and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and served as the poetry chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council. Casper will be at Miami Book Fair appearing in conversation with Ada Limón, the current poet laureate of the United States.

Terry Catasús Jennings is a Cuban American writer who immigrated to the United States in 1961 after her father was jailed in Cuba by Fidel Castro’s government. She’s the author of the Definitely Dominguita series; The Women’s Liberation Movement, 1960-1990; and Pauli Murray: The Life of a Pioneering Feminist & Civil Rights Activist, a biography in verse. In The Little House of Hope (Neal Porter Books), illustrated by Raúl Colón, as Esperanza and her family settle into their new house, they all do their part to make it a home. When other immigrant families need a place to stay, it seems only natural for the family in “la casita” to help. Together they turn the house into a place where other new immigrants can help one another. Esperanza is always the first to welcome them to her home – it’s a safe place in a new land. This is Jennings’ semi-autobiographical story of how immigrants can help others find their footing in a new country. A Spanish edition, La Casita de Esperanza, was published simultaneously.

Francisco Céspedes (Santa Clara, Villa Clara, Cuba, 1957) Cantautor cubano. Saltó a la fama con su disco Vida loca (1998), al que le siguieron otros álbumes exitosos, como ¿Dónde está la vida? (2002) y Ay, corazón (2002). Acompaña al poeta Carlos Pintado en un espacio donde la poesía del autor radicado en Miami dialogará con la música del compositor y cantante Francisco “Pancho” Céspedes.

Soman Chainani is the New York Times bestselling author of the School for Good and Evil series. The fairy-tale saga has sold more than 3 million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and will soon be a major motion picture from Netflix, which Soman will executive produce. His most recent book, Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales, was also an instant New York Times bestseller and is in development to be a TV series from Sony 3000. In Rise of the School for Good and Evil (HarperCollins), two brothers – one good, one evil – watch over the Endless Woods. Together they choose the students for the School for Good and Evil. Together they train them, teach them, and prepare them for their fate. Then, something unexpected happens, something that will change everything and everyone. Who will survive? Who will rule the school? The journey starts here, with magic and surprises filling every step. Daring deeds test courage, loyalty, and who you really are. But they only lead you to the very beginning of the adventures that are the School for Good and Evil.

Haitian Canadian American writer and author Myriam J. A. Chancy, Ph.D., is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of What Storm, What Thunder (HarperCollins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake that was awarded a 2022 American Book Award (ABA) from the Before Columbus Foundation and named a best book of 2021 by NPR, Kirkus, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, The Boston Globe, Amazon Books, and Canada’s Globe and Mail. The book was also shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Caribbean Fiction; The Scorpion’s Claw; and Spirit of Haiti, which was shortlisted in the best first book category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize, 2004. Her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Room.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the collection Hunger and the novels Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the first Asian American and the first female director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In The Family Chao: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company), for 35 years the residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have enjoyed dining on the Fine Chao restaurant’s Americanized Chinese food, happy to shrug off unsavory whispers about the family owners: Big Leo Chao; his wife, Winnie; and their three sons, who have earned scholarships at good colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family’s secrets and simmering resentments erupt. Soon, patriarch Leo is found dead – presumed murdered – and his sons draw the gaze of the town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers, and as the spotlight on them tightens, they must reckon with the legacy of their father’s outsized appetites and their future survival.