more Cuban here than I am in Cuba, by sheer contrast and repetition. Sexuality Obejas identifies as a lesbian and frequently references sexuality in her writing. Although she often writes about her characters' struggles with sexuality and family acceptance, in an interview with Chicago LGBT newspaper Windy City Times, she said she did not experience significant family problems because of her sexuality: Remember, Cuba was known as the brothel of the Caribbean prior to the revolution. People went to Cuba to do the things they couldn't do in their home countries, but were free to do there. So Cubans have a sort of thick skin to most sexual stuff, which is not to say that my parents did, but as a general rule in the environment and the culture, there's a lot more possibility. I never had any sense of shame or anything like that. On a personal level, Obejas says she always accepted her sexual identity as part of herself: In terms of my own sexuality, I don't know what it was, but I just never blinked. I was always amazed when other people did; I was always sort of flabbergasted when people would suffer angst about it. I understood that it was taboo and all of that, but I chalked it up as a kind of a generational problem. Career She earned an M.F.A from Warren Wilson College in 1993. She was the Springer Lecturer in Creative Writing (2003–05) at the University of Chicago, as well as an advisor for the online prose magazine Otium. In fall of 2005, she served as the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai'i. She was the Sor Juana visiting writer at DePaul University from 2006 to 2012. From 2013 to 2019, she served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College, where she founded a Low-Residency MFA in Translation Program. In 2008, she translated Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, into Spanish. The Dominican-American author's novel addresses many themes, including young adult sexuality and national identity, also present in Obejas' work. She's also translated work by Rita Indiana, Wendy Guerra, Adam Mansbach, Carlos Velazquez, F.G. Haghenbeck, and many others. She is the rare translator who can work in and out of both English and Spanish. Obejas has written the novels Ruins, Memory Mambo and Days of Awe, and the story collection We