Achy Obejas

Obejas has written the novels Ruins, Memory Mambo and Days of Awe, and the story collection We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? as well as the poetry chapbook This is What Happened in Our Other Life. A new collection of short stories, "The Tower of Antilles & Other Stories" is coming from Akashic in 2017.

In 2014, she was awarded a USA Ford Fellowship for literature and translation.

In 2010 she was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

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.

As a Chicago Tribune columnist for nearly ten years, Obejas penned the nightlife column "After Hours". The column started when then-Friday section editor Kevin Moore asked the self-described insomniac if she would like to cover nighttime entertainment for the paper. In 2001, Obejas announced that she would no longer write the column.

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. She is currently the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she has founded the Low-Residency MFA in Translation Program.

Achy Obejas (born June 28, 1956) is a Cuban-American writer and translator focused on personal and national identity issues, living in Oakland, California. She frequently writes on her sexuality and nationality, and has received numerous awards for her creative work. Obejas' stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications. Some of her work was originally published in Esto no tiene nombre, a Latina lesbian magazine published and edited by tatiana de la tierra, which gave voice to the Latina lesbian community. Obejas worked as a journalist in Chicago for more than two decades, and is currently the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she teaches creative writing.

Obejas was born June 28, 1956, in Havana, Cuba. After emigrating to the United States at the age of six, she lived in Michigan City, Indiana, and attended Indiana University from 1977 to 1979, when she moved to Chicago.

Obejas practices activism through writing, by telling her own story about her identity, as well as others. Written in collaboration with Megan Bayles, the anthology Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories, is a collection of stories that seeks to describe the experience of people who have emigrated to America. While most anthologies focus on one group, this anthology expands the perspective to multiple group identities.