Achy Obejas (born June 28, 1956) is a Cuban-American writer and translator focused on personal and national identity issues,[1] living in Benicia, California.
Obejas' stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications.
In an interview with Gregg Shapiro, Obejas discussed the peculiar duality of growing up in the U.S. but not truly identifying as an American: I was born in Havana and that single event has pretty much defined the rest of my life.
So Cubans have a sort of thick skin to most sexual stuff, which is not to say that my parents did, but as a general rule in the environment and the culture, there's a lot more possibility.
From 2013 to 2019, she served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College, where she founded a Low-Residency MFA in Translation Program.
The Dominican-American author's novel addresses many themes, including young adult sexuality and national identity, also present in Obejas' work.
Obejas has written the novels Ruins, Memory Mambo and Days of Awe, and the story collection We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?
In 2021, she released the widely praised Boomerang/Bumerán through Beacon Press, a non-gendered collection of poetry in English and Spanish addressing immigration, activism and other issues.
The column started when then-Friday section editor Kevin Moore asked the self-described insomniac if she would like to cover nighttime entertainment for the paper.