Achy Obejas

Achy Obejas is a Cuban American novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and editor whose work frequently moves between Spanish and English and between Havana and the United States. For Havana Noir, published by Akashic Books in 2007, she selected the stories and translated thirteen of the eighteen contributions into English. The anthology gathers writers from Cuba and its diaspora, organizing contrasting views of the city through neighborhood-based fiction and the publisher's international Noir series. Obejas also contributed a story to the volume. Her own books include Memory Mambo, Days of Awe, Ruins, The Tower of the Antilles, and the bilingual poetry collection Boomerang/Bumerán. As a translator, she has worked on books by Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Wendy Guerra, and other Caribbean writers. Havana Noir therefore reflects several strands of Obejas's career at once: editorial curation, literary translation, creative writing, and sustained attention to the contradictions of Cuban life across languages and borders.