Photo by Wenceslao Cruz Blanco
The Fourteenth Conference on Cuban and Cuban American Studies, to be held in Miami on February 15–16, 2024, will be dedicated to Dr. Uva de Aragón, in recognition of her numerous academic and literary contributions to Cuban and Cuban American studies.
Uva de Aragón has written extensively as an academic, journalist, and creative writer. She has made incursions in all the literary genres throughout her long and productive career. She has published nineteen books of poems, essays, short stories, novels, and a play, some of them translated into English. Several of her works appear in anthologies. For many years she wrote a weekly column for Diario Las Américas and El Nuevo Herald. Her blog Habanera soy (https://uvadearagon.wordpress.com/) is read worldwide.
Among her works are three novels, El crimen de Biltmore Way: Un caso de la detective María Duquesne (2022), The Miracle of Saint Lazarus: A Mystery More Than Twenty Years in the Making (2019), and The Memory of Silence/Memoria del silencio (2014); a memoir, El reino de la infancia: Memorias de mi vida en Cuba (2022); a book of essays, El caimán ante el espejo: Un ensayo de interpretación de lo cubano (1993/2000); and two collections of journalistic chronicles, El mundo y mi Cuba en el Diario (2016) and Morir de exilio (2006). She has received several literary awards in the United States, Europe, and Cuba.
Until her retirement in 2011, she was Associate Director of the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) at Florida International University, where she also taught. She served for six years as Associate Editor of Cuban Studies, the most important academic journal focusing on Cuba. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Spanish American Literature at the University of Miami. Born in Havana, she has lived in the United States since 1959, when she left Cuba as an exile.
