Raul Ramos y Sanchez

“January” is the first English word I ever learned. I read it on the calendar thumbtacked to the wall of our apartment in the Bronx. Han-noo-a-ree, I pronounced it. That was in the winter of 1957. My mother had just divorced my father and moved us from Havana to New York City. My father was busy trying to overthrow Batista and my mother thought her prospects for raising a seven-year-old son looked much better sewing sequins on evening gowns in the midtown garment district than in a Cuban prison. Thanks, mamá. You made the right call.

Since mastering that first English word, the power and joy of words have become my life. I not only love words, I’ve made a living from them. First, composing them into pages as a graphic designer, and later arranging them into sentences as an advertising writer. After twenty-four years of creating the fiction commonly known as advertising, I decided to start telling my own stories.

THE SKINNY YEARS is my fourth novel. Called “gritty and witty” by Foreword Reviews, it’s a coming-of-age story set in Miami during the stormy 1960s. The novel follows the quirky travails of young Victor “Skinny” Delgado and his Cuban-exile family over their first ten years in the United States. Some readers have asked if the novel is autobiographical. The short answer is “no.” But my childhood memories of growing up in Miami are the inspiration for the story. In reality, my first experiences in the U.S. began in New York City.