Engle, Margarita (1951-…), is an American author known for adult and children’s books that reflect her Cuban heritage. In 2017, Engle was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation, an independent American literary organization. The appointment runs for two years.
Engle has won three Pura Belpré Awards. She won the award in 2008 for The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (2006); in 2009 for The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom (2008); and in 2016 for Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir (2015). All are written in verse. The Belpré Award is given annually to a Latino or Latina author and to a Latino or Latina illustrator “whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.” In 2019, Engle published Soaring Earth, a companion volume to Enchanted Air. Soaring Earth is a memoir of her adolescence and early adulthood, also written in verse.
Engle began her writing career with two adult novels set in Cuba, Singing to Cuba (1993) and Skywriting: A Novel of Cuba (1995). Her other children’s and young adult books with Cuban backgrounds include Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (2009), The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette’s Journey to Cuba (2010), The Wild Book (2012), Lightning Dreamer (2013), and Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl’s Courage Changed Music (2015). They also include Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words (2016), All the Way to Havana (2017), Your Heart, My Sky: Love in a Time of Hunger (2021), and Rima’s Rebellion: Courage in a Time of Tyranny (2022).
Engle also wrote several other historical novels in verse for children and young adults. These books include Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal (2014), about the digging of the Panama Canal; Jazz Owls (2018), set in the Latino community of Los Angeles during World War II (1939-1945); and With a Star in My Hand: Rubén Darío, Poetry Hero (2020), about the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.
Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian (2010) is a children’s picture book about a girl scientist who lived in Germany in the 1600’s, and Orangutanka (2015) is a children’s book of poems. Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln (2019) is a picture book about the Venezuelan-born pianist and composer Teresa Carreño. Engle’s poems in Light for All (2021) describe the experiences of immigrants in America and the hopes that the Statue of Liberty has inspired. Engle also wrote Singing with Elephants (2022), a novel in verse.
Margarita Mondrus was born on Sept. 2, 1951, in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban-born mother and an American father. She married Curtis Engle, a research biologist, in 1978. She earned a B.S. degree from Cal Poly (the California State Polytechnic University) in 1974 and an M.S. degree from Iowa State University in 1977. Engle taught agronomy (the study of soil and crops) at Cal Poly from 1978 to 1982.
