Margarita Engle
From AwardAnnals
Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several books about the island. Awards include a Cintas Fellowship, a San Diego Book Award, and a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Margarita lives in California, where she enjoys hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and helping her husband with his volunteer work for a wilderness search-and-rescue dog training program.
Works
- 2 works
- Show titles only
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
Margarita Engle
It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not tree. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.
Black, white, Cuban, Spanish—Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba.
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano
Margarita Engle
A lyrical biography of a Cuban slave who escaped to become a celebrated poet.
Born into the household of a wealthy slave owner in Cuba in 1797, Juan Francisco Manzano spent his early years by the side of a woman who made him call her Mama, even though he had a mama of his own. Denied an education, young Juan still showed an exceptional talent for poetry. His verses reflect the beauty of his world, but they also expose its hideous cruelty.
Powerful, haunting poems and breathtaking illustrations create a portrait of a life in which even the pain of slavery could not extinguish the capacity for hope.
