Margarita Engle

Margarita Engle (born September 2, 1951) is a Cuban American poet and author of many award-winning books for children, young adults and adults. Most of Engle's stories are written in verse and are a reflection of her Cuban heritage and her deep appreciation and knowledge of nature. She became the first Latino awarded a Newbery Honor in 2009 for The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom. She was selected by the Poetry Foundation to serve from 2017 to 2019 as the sixth Young People's Poet Laureate. On October 9, 2018, Margarita Engle was announced the winner of the 2019 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. She was nominated by 2019 NSK Prize jury member Lilliam Rivera. Her 2024 book, Wild Dreamers, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Early life Engle's father was born in Los Angeles, California and her mother in Trinidad, Cuba. Although Engle was born and raised in California, growing up, she spent many summers with her extended family in Cuba.

Career Engle earned a B.S. from California State Polytechnic University in 1974, an M.S. from Iowa State University in 1977, and nearly completed a doctoral degree in biology from the University of California, Riverside in 1983. 2006 Américas Award winner International Reading Association Teachers' Choice ALA Best Books for Young Adults NCTE Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts Bank Street

THE SURRENDER TREE, Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom (Henry Holt & Co., 2008) 2009 Newbery Honor Paterson Prize 2010 Américas Award Commendation Kansas NEA Reading Circle List Intermediate Title Walter Dean Myers Honor Book

Selected works "Archetype"; "Memory"; "Variations on a Theme", Terrain.org Singing to Cuba, Arte Publico Press, 1993, Skywriting, Bantam Books, 1995, The Poet Slave of Cuba, a Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Henry Holt & Co., April, 2006) The Surrender Tree (Holt, 2008) Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, Macmillan, 2009, The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba, Henry Holt & Co., 2010, Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian, Henry Holt & Co., 2010, Hurricane Dancers The First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck, Henry Holt & Co., 2011, The Wild Book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, When You Wander, Henry Holt and Co., 2013, The Lightning Dreamer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 201, Mountain Dog, Henry Holt and Co., 2013, Orangutanka: A Story in Poems, Henry Holt and Co., 2015, Drum Dream Girl, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2015, Lion Island: Cuba's Warrior of Words, Simon and Schuster, 2017 Dreams from Many Rivers, Henry Holt and Co., 2019 Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019