"Jaquira Díaz illuminates the beauty and brutality of being a teenager."
                                                                --The Southern Review

Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira and her family moved to Miami Beach when she was just eight years old. She attended Nautilus Middle School and Miami Beach High, both of which she revisits in her writing. In her fiction and creative nonfiction Jaquira often writes about the duality of the immigrant experience, sexuality, juvenile delinquency, coming of age, working class families and communities, war and its effects on women and children, crime, and poverty. And she's been known to pen the occasional zombie or alien invasion story.  

Her short stories were awarded the 2009 AWP Intro Journals Award and runner up in Playboy’s 2008 College Fiction Contest. Her creative nonfiction received an honorable mention in The Atlantic’s 2010 Student Writing Contest, and she was recently awarded the Ann and Edgar Hirshberg Award for Creative Writing, the Knocky Parker Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers’ Conference award for Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, The Southern Review, Slice Magazine, Juked, Prism Review, Los Angeles Review, Passages North, Harpur Palate, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. 

Jaquira teaches Fiction Writing at the University of South Florida, where she's also worked as Managing Editor of Saw Palm: florida literature and art. She's currently completing a novel, but when she's not writing, she co-produces Life Out Loud, a reading series that brings music, poetry, memoir, and true stories to a live audience. Her obsessions include sushi, coffee, road trips, roller derby, slaying vampire-zombie hybrids, pretending she's in the WNBA, and writing trashy erotica under the guise of a few outlandish pseudonyms. Don’t judge. She also gives money to the ASPCA and bakes cupcakes for the needy.