Margarita Mondrus Engle

Margarita Mondrus Engle’s writing has been concerned with the dual nature of heredity and culture. She is the daughter of a Cuban mother and had the opportunity to spend part of her childhood in Cuba. Her father is an American artist who traveled to Cuba to paint the picturesque city of her mother’s birth and upbringing: Trinidad. As a journalist and writer, Engle has been able to return to Cuba during the last few years.

As noted above, Engle has led a dual career as a fiction writer and journalist whose opinion columns on topics ranging from culture and history to personal experience have been syndicated on a regular basis since 1982 to over two hundred newspapers. Her short stories have been published in Nuestro, The Americas Review, Revista Interamericana and various others. Engle has also published non-fiction pieces in such national magazines as Vista, Hispanic, South American Explorer, Garden and others. Many of Engle’s non-fiction articles are related to plant and soil science; she is a botanist by training and profession and has worked as an irrigation specialist in Southern California up until 1990. Nevertheless, it is her fiction writing, particularly as related to Cuban and Cuban-American subjects, that is her passion, as can be seen in the following stories.