Henríquez's father is from Panama and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971 for college;[2] her mother is from New Jersey[3] and worked in Delaware public schools as a translator.

[5] She did not speak Spanish as a child and so on visits "had no choice but to sit there and observe" dynamics she later evoked in her writing, particularly the warmth and joy of family life among her father's relatives.

Uninterested in her frequently-professed affections for him, the boy in question gave her a journal and suggested that she instead write down everything she wanted to tell him and give them to him at the end of a year.

[9] She has described her time in the Iowa program as "a great experience",[10] highly valuable both for validating her writing as well as developing her skills: "I have all my notebooks...and I still open them every once in a while to find something that Chris Offutt said about dialogue or something that Sam Chang said about structure or that Marilynne Robinson said about subordinate clauses.

[13] Reviewing the collection in The New York Times, Thomas Beller said, "Henríquez's fiction provides intense close-ups of young Panamanians whose lives are in enormous flux...Always she appears to be probing for rare moments of grace.

[18] Henríquez has also contributed to the anthologies This Is Not Chick Lit (Random House, 2006)[19] and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers (Harper, 2008).