Roxanne Hernandez

A multi-layered story told by two narrators: a 21st-century Emily Dickinson living in Mexico City who relates to the world vicariously through her children and a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a dying poet living in a run-down apartment in Philadelphia in the 1950s. While she tells the story of her past as a young editor in New York City desperately trying to convince a publisher to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen-an...

The daughter of a Chilean father and a Filipina mother, Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon grew up as a shy, timid child in a small Midwestern town during the 1960s. Targeted by school bullies and dismissed by many of her teachers, she worried that people would find out the truth: that she was INTF. Incompetent. Nerd. Terrified. Failure. This feeling stayed with her well into her twenties when she was told that "girls can't do science" or "women just don't...

Two divorces have taught Mariela Estevez that she's better suited to being a mistress than a wife. Whose heart needs all that "forever after" trouble? Still, her affair with her married lover, Hector, has become problematic-especially because he's also a tenant in her apartment building in the heart of Miami's Calle Ocho in Little Havana. But when Hector is found dead just steps from Mariela's back door, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, she's...

These eight short stories and novella travel from Panama's dusty city streets to its humid beaches to create an affecting portrait of a country in transition. They illustrate family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion. Tender, ambitious, bold, and unflinching, they reveal a fresh, exciting, and lavishly talented voice in American literature.