Cristina Henriquez
Cristina Henríquez is the author of four books, including The Book of Unknown Americans, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s Top 10 Books of the Year. It was the Daily Beast Novel of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, an NPR Great Read, a Target Book of the Month selection, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by BookPage, Oprah.com, and School Library Journal. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Henriquez is also the author of The Great Divide, The World In Half, and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories.
Her work been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Real Simple, and more, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant.
She has been a guest on National Public Radio, and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father.
“It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing.”
“And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think.”
“Armando's not a pork chop, I say. She shrugs. At least a pork chop would feed you.”