Dariel Suarez was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. In 1997, at age fourteen, he immigrated to the United States with his family during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. Dariel is now the author of the novel The Playwright’s House (forthcoming, Red Hen Press) and the story collection A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Books), winner of the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories, and a MassBook Award “Must Read.” He has also published a poetry chapbook, In The Land of Tropical Martyrs (Backbone Press).
Dariel is an inaugural City of Boston Artist Fellow and the Education Director at GrubStreet, the country’s largest independent creative writing center. His prose has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, and The Caribbean Writer, where his work was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. He earned his MFA in Fiction at Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.
Before graduating from college, Dariel worked stocking shelves at a supermarket, cleaning office buildings, disassembling cars at a junkyard, loading trucks at a warehouse, operating a forklift, as a music store clerk, costumer service phone rep, and writing center tutor. In addition to being a writer, Dariel is an avid rock guitarist, chess player, soccer (it’s actually fútbol) fan, and terrible but willing salsa dancer.
July 10, 2013 at 9:01 pm
HI Dariel; it so good and inspiring to find a young Cuban writer like yourself in this country! I also grew up in Cuba and came on 1999. I dream of becoming a writer of some sort one day…. I will be following your writings and supporting you along the way!
I write my very own non-senses in my blog http://www.buscandoutopia.com; check it out when you have a chance and feel free to leave your opinion there…
Felicidades en todos tus logros y sigue adelante!
July 10, 2013 at 10:03 pm
Gracias, Yahu! I’ll make sure to follow you as well. Hopefully this writing journey will be a long and fruitful one. Siempre es bueno encontrar a otros cubanos amantes de la literatura.
June 29, 2013 at 9:00 am
I was there
June 29, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Yes, you were. Baltimore was good times.