Cristina Garcia is a noted author who has published novels, anthologies, poetry and nonfiction pieces. Her latest work, released in 2011, is the young adult novel, “Dreams of Significant Girls,” and it has already received great feedback from reviewers. Most of her novels deal with political problems in Cuba. She has been honored with multiple awards for her writing, and she continues to write about important issues people in our world are facing.

“Like other Cuban-American writers, Cristina writes ‘from’ Cuba but ‘toward’ the United States,” explains Gustavo Pérez Firmat, a professor at Columbia University.

Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba, but her family fled to New York, after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, when she was only two years old. She grew up in the Brooklyn area but still finds inspiration for her writing from her Cuban roots and the struggles her family faced.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in political science in 1979, and she attended John Hopkins University for her master’s in European and Latin American Studies in 1981. Her interest and studies in these varying fields shows through in all of her writing.

After graduating from college, she became a political reporter for Time Magazine before she started writing more fiction pieces, which led to her becoming a well-known novelist. 

Her first novel, “Dreaming in Cuban,” which was published in 1992, received critical acclaim and paved the way for her future writing career. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, and even though she did not win, she has won many different awards for her writing since then, such as The Whiting Writer’s Award in 1996, The Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1997, The Northern California Book Award in 2008 and many more.

Garcia now resides in New Mexico, but she travels throughout the country teaching courses at various universities, performing book readings and assisting with writing workshops. She has also been a literary judge and has contributed to the writing community in many ways.

Garcia’s next event will be here at UNCW on March 7. She will be in Lumina Theater in the Fisher Student Center at 4:30 p.m. to do a reading followed by a book signing. This is part of The Buckner Lecture Series being held here, and this is a great opportunity to hear stories from a successful author.

The event is free and open to the public. This event should be very enjoyable and educational based on the feedback from her previous events similar to this one. She was last at UC Berkeley, and she read from her novel, “The Lady Matador’s Hotel,” and discussed important elements of it. 

The news site, Berkeleyside, described this book, saying her “powerful and gorgeous novel tells the story of the intertwining lives of the denizens of a luxurious hotel in an unnamed Central American capital in the midst of political turmoil.”

In the future, Garcia’s next big event is the Las Dos Brujas Writing Workshop, taking place in Ghost Ranch, N.M. from June 3-9. This is a conference that consists of writer’s workshops, craft talks and readings that span across the week. Attendees will have the opportunity to work and learn from many successful authors as they work on their own writing.  

“There are at least three realities competing for my attention at all times: the world I’m writing; the world I’m reading; and the world of my daily life,” Garcia said in an interview conducted by Chris Abani for Bomb Magazine.

From this, it is clear that she will continue to write and share her knowledge with her fans.