Ana Menendez

Background

Menéndez was born to Cuban exile parents who fled to Los Angeles, California in 1964.

Education

Florida International University.

Career

As a result, Menéndez spoke only Spanish until she enrolled in kindergarten. The family later moved first to Tampa, Florida, and then Miami, Florida, where Menéndez went to high school. Menéndez received her Bachelor of Arts from Florida International University in 1992.

Menéndez spent six years as a journalist in the 1990s.

She began at The Miami Herald in 1991, where she covered the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana, and then moved to The Orange County Register in California. After pursuing a literary career for several years, she returned to The Miami Herald in 2005 as a columnist.

In 2008, Menéndez took a leave of absence from The Miami Herald to accept a Fulbright grant to teach at the American University in Cairo. In 1997, Menéndez entered the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she was a New York Times fellowship

Her collection of short stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was published shortly after her graduation in 2001.

Menéndez published her first novel, Loving Che, in 2003. Her third book, The Last War, was published by HarperCollins in June 2009. Adios, Happy Homeland! a book of linked, formally experimental short stories was published in 2011.

Alvarez Borland, Isabel.

“Figures of Identity: Ana Menéndez’s and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Photographs.” Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities. Education Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch.

Albany: State University of New York P, 2009. 31–45. Kadiyoti, Dalia.

“Consuming Nostalgia: Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina García and Ana Menéndez.” MELUS 31.1 (2006): 81–97.

Kakutani, Michiko. “As the Day Wanes, Missing the Cuban Sun.” Review of In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd, by Ana Menéndez. New York Times 19 June 2001: E8.

Machado Sáez, Elena (2015), "Messy Intimacies: Postcolonial Romance in Ana Menéndez, Dionne Brand, and Monique Roffey", Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Sims, Robert L. “Che Guevara, Nostalgia, Photography, Felt History and Narrative Discourse in Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che.” Hipertexto 11 (2010): 103 –16. Socolovsky, Maya. “Cuba Interrupted: The Loss of Center and Story in Ana Menéndez’s In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” Critique 46.3 (2005): 235–51. Sutherland, Julia. Financial Times 31 January

2004: 31.

Whitfield, Esther. “Umbilical Chords.” Review of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, by Ana Menéndez. Zaleski, Jeff. Review of In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd, by Ana Menéndez.

Publishers Weekly 7 May 2001: 221.

Achievements

• The New York Times named it a Notable Book of The Year and the title story won the Pushcart Prize for short fiction.

Politics

“Cuban Missives: Ana Menéndez’s Plot Is Layered with Passions Both Sexual and Political.” Review of Loving Che, by Ana Menéndez. Women's Review of Books 18 (2001): 31.