About

SUSANNAH RODRÍGUEZ DRISSI is an award-winning Cuban poet, writer, playwright, translator, director, producer, and scholar. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA where she teaches in Writing Programs and in the Academic Advancement Program. She has been a UC-Cuba Affiliate Scholar since 2009. Currently, she is at work on her book manuscript, Moorish Cuba. Her recent academic publications include “Call Him Ismael: Marti’s Oriente and the Arab World,” in the peer-edited journal Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (2019) and “Reading Abdala in the Arab Spring,” in Reading Cuba (Aduana Vieja, 2018). Her poems, short stories, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in anthologies such as In Season—Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places in Between (2018 Florida Book Award Winner); and journals such as Publishers’ Weekly, the Miami Herald, Nuevo Herald, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Saw Palm, Literal Magazine, Diario de Cuba (Madrid), SX Salon, Raising Mothers, Acentos Review and Cuba Counterpoints, among other journals. Following readings at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, Los Angeles, her award-winning play, Houses Without Walls, premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2018. Her novel, Until We’re Fish, was a finalist for the 2018 Veliz Book Publication Award and the 2019 Tuscarora Historical Novel Award. Until We’re Fish is forthcoming in fall 2020. More recently, her short plays The Fruit Flies and Rey y Atenea were selected to the 2019 Short+Sweet Theatre Festival and premiered at the Lee Strasberg Film & Theatre Institute, in Los Angeles. Rey y Atenea received an Audience Choice Award and was a finalist for the NBC Creative Talent Award. She is the author of the poetry collection The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos (Floricanto Press, 2019) and Rey y Atenea / Rey and Atenea, a Bilingual Edition (Cassandra Press, 2019).