Mayra Montero

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Mayra Montero (b. 1952) is a well-known Cuban-Puerto Rican writer.

1 Biography
2 Literary Work
3 Political Activism
4 Works
5 External link

[edit] Biography

Montero was born in Havana, Cuba in 1952. She left Cuba at a young age and has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a popular weekly column in Spanish "Antes que llegue el lunes" (Before Monday arrives) in El Nuevo Dia newspaper.

[edit] Literary Work

All of her books are written originally in Spanish and have been broadly translated to English and other languages. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards. Each of her subsequent books -- The Last Night I Spent With You, The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm of Darkness, and The Messenger -- has been published in the United States in translations by Edith Grossman, as well as in several European countries. Her other nonfiction work appears frequently in scholarly and literary publications throughout the world. Her most recent novel "Son de Almendra" is the product of an extensive research about the murder of the mafia leader Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York in the year 1957.

[edit] Political Activism

Recently, on January 26, 2006, Mayra Montero joined other internationally renowned figures and Latin American authors such as Nobel-laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Armando Fernández, Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Ana Lydia Vega and world famous singer/composer Pablo Milanés, in demanding sovereignty for Puerto Rico and adding their name and signatue to the Latin American and Caribbean Congress' Proclamation for the Independence of Puerto Rico, which approved a resolution favoring the island-nation's right to assert its independence, as ratified unanimously by political parties hailing from twenty two Latin American countries in November of 2006. [1] Montero's demand for the recognition of Puerto Rico's independence was obtained at the behest of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP).[2]