Obejas, Achy

Achy Obejas is a Cuban American writer, translator, and activist whose work focuses on personal and national identity. She is the author of The Tower of the Antilles: Short Stories, Ruins, Days of Awe: A Novel, and the poetry chapbook This is What Happened in Our Other Life. As a translator, she has worked with Wendy Guerra, Rita Indiana, Junot Díaz, and Megan Maxwell, among others. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. She is currently a writer/editor for Netflix. Boomerang/Bumerán: Poetry/Poesía (Beacon Press) is a bilingual collection of lyrical poetry written in bold, mostly gender-free English and Spanish that addresses immigration, displacement, love, and activism. The book is divided into three sections: poems addressing immigration and displacement; those addressing love, lost and found; and verses focusing on action and on ways of addressing injustice and repairing the world. Obejas is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls literatura del desarraigo, a Spanish literary tradition.