DECEMBER 13, 2018

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It makes sense that Achy Obejas is Indiana’s translator. Obejas is a Cuban-American journalist, translator, fiction writer, and poet, who lives in California. She writes predominantly in English but her publications circulate in the Spanish-language market too — some of the short stories in Aguas y otros cuentos, a collection published in Cuba, have been self-translated from English, while others were written in Spanish. Her English poetry evokes spoken Caribbean Spanish and draws on African-American Vernacular English and Afro-Caribbean cultural forms in ways that engage with the racial and ethnic heterogeneity of the US Caribbean diaspora. As Tentacle and her Spanish translations of Díaz’s books show, she has the enviable ability to translate both into and out of Spanish with equal energy and creativity.

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