Miami is a sprawling global metropolis and multi-cultural melting pot, and its unique diversity is explored in the work of local writers and storytellers. At the heart of their work is the connection between place, past and present. Edwidge Danticat, Richard Blanco, Ana Menéndez, Les Standiford, and Darius Daugherty, three novelists and two poets, are particularly adept at shaping identity through narrative.
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat chronicles the Immigrant story through the lens of place and identity. (Library of Congress)
Danticat is a Haitian-American writer whose novels and short stories explore the depths of the immigrant experience. She is well known for her 1994 novel, “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” and her 2007 memoir, “Brother I’m Dying,” both of which explore the intricacies of those whjo arive iun the United States from elsewhere. There are dual identities and the feeling of connection to home – even when home no longer exists. These concepts are shaped through individual and collective memory within a community.
In her writing, Danticat documents resilience within the Haitian community. Her work highlights how immigrants hold onto the past while accepting the new. Rather than force cultural assimilation, Miami uncannily embraces the unique culture that comes with diversity.
Danticat has won several awards for her work including the National Book Award for her 1995 short story collection, “ Krik? Krak!” a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, and most recently, the PEN/Malamud prize for lifetime achievement in short story writing in 2023.
Richard Blanco
Blanco is an American poet and teacher. He was the inaugural poet at President Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration. (Wikimedia Commons)
If you sit in on a poetry lecture delivered by former US inaugural poet laureate, Richard Blanco you might very well hear him discuss his connection to, or as he likes to call it, “obsession” with place.
Growing up the son of Cuban exiles in suburban Miami, Blanco often felt lost between his parents’ version home they had left in Cuba and his idealized imagining of the American dream. This conflict is represented throughout his poetry collections and intimately portrayed in his 2014 memoir, “The Prince of Los Cocuyos.”
In 2012, Blanco became the youngest, first Latino, and first openly gay inaugural poet, reading his poem “One Today” at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
In 2023 President Joe Biden awarded Blanco the National Humanities Medal National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ana Menendez
Photo Courtesy (Ana Menéndez)
Menéndez is a novelist, former journalist, and educator who lives in Miami and writes about the Cuban exile experience.
When she began her career as a reporter for the Miami Herald, Ana Menéndez says she found unique joy and fulfillment in telling other people’s stories. She later channeled this passion into creative narrative storytelling when she published her first short story collection, “In Cuba I was a German Shepard” in 2001. The collection was named by the New York Times as a Notable Book of The Year and the title story won the Pushcart Prize for short fiction.
She has since published four other books chronicling the Cuban exile experience. Like Blanco and Danticat, she incorporates longing for belonging into her stories. But rather than center these themes on personal narrative, Menéndez introduces the dimension of place so vividly that it becomes, in a sense, its character in the stories. Her most recent work, “The Apartment,” experiments with this connection of place to narrative. Documenting a single apartment unit and its many tenants over seven decades, the novel explores the evolution of Miami Beach and the people who passed through it. The novel compels readers to think beyond their individuality, recognizing how each moment of their lives is shaped by all that has come before.
Les Standiford
Photo Courtesy of ArtSpeak
Les Standiford has lived in South Florida and has written about the area for decades. He’s witnessed its evolution into a cultural hotspot for the literary arts. He recalls that when he published his first novel in 1993, the Miami literary community was known for just about one thing – crime novels.
But in the decades since, Standiford has observed a shift in local literary narrative away from the stereotypical crime novels that used to dominate our local world of books toward the multicultural literary scene of today.
Standiford considers Miami to be on the “frontier of cultural exploration,” explaining how, from his perspective, Miami captures the interest of storytellers because of its cultural collision and uniqueness. To him, Miami is a place like nowhere else. In 1989, he founded the Creative Writing MFA at Florida International University, a program he feels has guided the next generations of creative writers.
Darius Daughtry
Daughtry has devoted his work to educating and engaging youth on the power of narrative storytelling in shaping community identity and resilience. (Beverly R. Muzii)
Daughtry, a poet, social critic, and educator, is reshaping what it means to tell a community’s story. In 2019 he published “And the Walls Came Tumbling,” an introspective poetic memoir and sweeping cultural critique. But by using spoken word as his primary medium, he aspires to inspire individual and collective action through narrative performances. In 2015 he launched the Arts Prevails Project as a rebuttal to limited art education access in the underserved and historically disadvantaged communities. The program strives to empower youth in these communities by making art accessible, entertaining, informative, and inspirational. Nearly a decade later, Daughtry has worked with young people across South Florida, motivating them to develop their voices and speak their truth.
