Anjanette Delgado

Delgado was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico[7] to middle class parents in a tumultuous relationship. Her work addresses her violent childhood, themes of domestic violence, child abuse, incest, and the relationship between the colonization of Puerto Rico and the severe gender violence suffered by women and girls on the Caribbean island.[8] Examples are the short stories “Once in a Blue Room”[9] (Kenyon Review, 2018), “Lucky” (Pleiades Mag, 2019) and “De mangós y de murciélagos” (Revista Hostosiana, CUNY, 2019).

Though born and raised in Puerto Rico, Delgado spent three years of her childhood (1975-1978) in the East Bronx of New York as part of her mother’s attempt to escape their domestic situation, after which she returned to Puerto Rico, a bilingual child in love with reading and writing. She would migrate again in 1991 due to the increase in gender violence on the island in 1990, and delves deeply into the themes of immigration and displacement in her novels, The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, and in her anthology, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University Press of Florida, 2021).

Deldago completed her bachelor's in Mass Communications with minors in Broadcast Television and Journalism at the University of Puerto Rico and her master's in Fine Arts, Creative Writing at Florida International University.[10]

Delgado began her career as a journalist and executive producer for television and digital outlets[11] such as CNN Headline News, Univision Network, Telemundo Network, MGM Latin America, BBC,[12] and NBC, among others. In 1994, she won an Emmy for the special feature series Madres en la lejanía,[13] which she produced and co-wrote with Miami journalist Alina Mayo Azze. The series depicted the lives of Latina mothers who worked as undocumented nannies in the USA, having left their own children behind in order to provide them with a better life.

In 2008, Delgado turned to literature. She is the author of The Heartbreak Pill (Simon and Schuster, 2008), a 2009 winner of the Latino International Book Award, and of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (Kensington Publishing & Penguin Random House, 2014),[14] which Miami’s El Nuevo Herald newspaper declared Calle 8’s preeminent novel. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as in The Kenyon Review,[15] Pleiades, Vogue, The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, The Hong Kong Review, and NPR, among others.[16][17]

She is a Bread Loaf Conference alumni, served as a judge for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award in 2015,[3] and is a 2016 Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction. In 2020, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Lucky.”

Delgado is a prolific columnist and book reviewer and has taught writing for the Center for Literature and the Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College,[18] for Florida International University, and writer’s conferences from New Jersey to Mexico City and Puerto Rico. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University, where she currently teaches fiction and nonfiction writing.[19]

She is the editor of Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, which features writing by Richard Blanco, Reinaldo Arenas, Patricia Engel, Jennine Capó Crucet, Vera, Pedro Medina León, Carlos Pintado, Amina Gautier, Ana Menéndez, and others. Her upcoming novel is Los muertos de hambre (The Hungry).

Delgado was a finalist of the 2021 Hemingway Shorts Contest.[20]