Congratulations to the new Young People’s Poet Laureate, Margarita Engle! 

Poet, novelist, and journalist Margarita Engle was born in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban mother and an American father. She is the author of many children’s books, including Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl’s Courage Changed Music (2015) and Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian (2010). She has also authored several young adult novels in verse, including The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom (2008), which received a Newbery Honor and won a Pura Belpré Award; Tropical Secret (2009), winner of a Sydney Taylor Award for Teen Readers and a Paterson Prize; and Hurricane Dancers (2011), nominated for an ALA Best Books for Young Adults award. On the impact Cuba has had in her writing, she says, “For more than three decades, official US government travel restrictions made [visiting Cuba] impossible, so I used my imagination, remembering childhood visits, and wondering about the person I would be if that right to travel back and forth freely had not been taken away from me by a historical situation.”