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Cristina Henriquez

Born: Deleware
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Henriquez earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. She lives in a western suburb of Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

Biography: Cristina Henriquez received her MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI along with the anthology This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers. Cristina's non-fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Oxford American, and Preservation 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 was featured in Virginia Quarterly Review as one of Fiction's New Luminaries, 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.


Awards:
  • Come Together, Fall Apart Editors' Choice selection, New York Times
  • The Book of Unknown Americans New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s 10 Best 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 also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Romance

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

E-Mail: cristina@cristinahenriquez.com
Web: http://www.cristinahenriquez.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Henr%C3%ADquez


Selected Titles

Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories
ISBN: 1594482411 OCLC: 61240722

Riverhead Books, New York : c2006.

A collection of tales set in contemporary Panama introduces several young people at emotional crossroads, from a man who can't commit to marriage to an American girl who stays with her grandparents while her parents divorce.

The Book of Unknown Americans
ISBN: 0385350848 OCLC: 849822505

A dazzling, heartbreaking page-turner destined for breakout status: a novel that gives voice to millions of Americans as it tells the story of the love between a Panamanian boy and a Mexican girl: teenagers living in an apartment block of immigrant families like their own. After their daughter Maribel suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras leave México and come to America. But upon settling at Redwood Apartments, a two-story cinderblock complex just off a highway in Delaware, they discover that Maribel's recovery-the piece of the American Dream on which they've pinned all their hopes-will not be easy. Every task seems to confront them with language, racial, and cultural obstacles. At Redwood also lives Mayor Toro, a high school sophomore whose family arrived from Panamà fifteen years ago. Mayor sees in Maribel something others do not: that beyond her lovely face, and beneath the damage she's sustained, is a gentle, funny, and wise spirit. But as the two grow closer, violence casts a shadow over all their futures in America.

The Great Divide: A Novel
ISBN: 0063291320 OCLC:

Ecco 2024

It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection. Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid. John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice. Searing and empathetic,The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.

The World in Half
ISBN: 1594484392 OCLC: 233548549

Riverhead Books, New York : 2009.

Miraflores has never known her father, and until now, she's never thought that he wanted to know her. She's long been aware that her mother had an affair with him while she was stationed with her then husband in Panama, and she's always assumed that her pregnant mother came back to the United States alone with his consent. But when Miraflores returns to the Chicago suburb where she grew up, to care for her mother at a time of illness, she discovers that her mother and father had a greater love than she ever thought possible, and that her father had wanted her more than she could have ever imagined.

 

 

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