Reina María Rodríguez

Reina María Rodríguez (b. 1952) lives in Havana, Cuba. Among other career awards, she has won the 2002 Alejo Carpentier Medal for Achievement in Cuban literature, Cuba’s 2013 National Prize for Literature, and the 2014 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Prize for Poetry. It is difficult to name her most important books due to the sustained quality of her writing. With La foto del invernadero (The Winter Garden Photograph), now in a bilingual edition from Ugly Duckling Presse, she took her second Casa de las Américas prize in 1998. Recent books of poetry by Rodríguez include El piano (The Piano) and Luciérnagas (Fireflies). Among her many books exploring prose and prose poetry are Páramos (Plains, which won the 1993 Julián del Casal prize as well as a 1995 National Critics’ Award), Otras cartas a Milena (Other Letters to Milena, 2003; bilingual edition published by the University of Alabama Press), a novel entitled Tres maneras de tocar un elefante (Three Ways to Touch an Elephant, which won the Italo Calvino Prize), Variedades de Galiano (Galiano St. Variety), Otras mitologías (Other Mythologies), and La caja de Bagdad.