Margarita Engle

In 1920s Cuba under a dictatorship, Rima, a multiracial girl shunned for being born outside marriage, grows up amid injustice and joins the suffragist fight for women's rights and legal protections.

In 1940s Santa Barbara, 11-year-old Oriol, a homesick Cuban American girl grieving her grandmother and bullied at school, befriends an elderly neighbor, the poet Gabriela Mistral. Through poetry she finds her voice and tries to help a baby elephant.

Sent to Cuba to visit a father he barely knows, Edver meets a half-sister he never knew about, and her plan to lure their mother to the island puts them in danger.

A biography in verse about Antonio Chuffat, a Chinese-African-Cuban teenager in the 1870s who becomes an advocate and interpreter fighting for the freedom of Chinese laborers and enslaved people in Cuba.

A memoir in verse about Engle's childhood split between Cold War-era Los Angeles and Cuba, and the heartbreak of the two countries becoming enemies.

When his mother goes to jail, eleven-year-old Tony moves to the Sierra Nevada to live with his great-uncle and learns trust from a search-and-rescue dog named Gabe.

In early twentieth-century Cuba, Fefa, who struggles with 'wordblindness' (dyslexia), transforms a blank book gifted by her mother into a place to tell her own stories, even as bandits threaten her family's land.

Daniel, a Jewish boy fleeing Nazi Germany, finds refuge in Cuba, where he forms unlikely friendships while waiting anxiously for his parents to escape.

In 2024, seventeen-year-old Evamar travels from New Jersey to Cuba with her brother to honor their late grandmother's last wish. There she falls for Río, a young musician deported to Cuba as a teen, and learns more about her grandmother and her Taíno heritage.

As children, Vida and Adán rescued animals together in Cuba. Years later in Florida, a captive fox brings them back together, but a grudge between their families threatens what's growing between them.

After a hurricane exposes her family's illegal sculpture garden and her artist parents are arrested in Cuba, Soleida escapes alone to Costa Rica, where she meets Dariel, a Cuban American boy whose music enchants birds.

In Cuba's "special period" of hunger in the 1990s, Liana and Amado find love and resistance in a time of scarcity.

A verse portrait of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the start of the Modernismo movement.

Margarita Engle recalls her teenage years in 1960s Los Angeles, when Cuba was out of reach and protest and poetry filled her life.

In 1943 Los Angeles, Mexican American sisters Marisela and Lorena work in the canneries by day and jitterbug with sailors by night, until racial violence erupts and their zoot-suited brother Ray is caught up in the Zoot Suit Riots.

Fourteen-year-old Mateo leaves Cuba to dig the Panama Canal in 1906 and joins other workers facing segregation and danger in the rain forest.

A verse portrait of Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who wrote against slavery and resisted an arranged marriage.

In 1510 a hurricane wrecks a pirate ship, and Quebrado, half Taíno and half Spanish, must decide whom to help among the survivors.

In 1851 Cuba, Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer's visit links her with Cecilia, an enslaved young woman assigned as her translator, and Elena, a wealthy merchant's twelve-year-old daughter, each longing for freedom.

Told across multiple voices and decades, this verse novel follows Rosa, a healer who treats the wounded of all sides during Cuba's wars for independence.

A biography in verse of Juan Francisco Manzano, born into slavery in Cuba in 1797, who was denied an education but grew up to become a celebrated poet.