Cristina Henríquez is the author of four books including, most recently, The Great Divide, which was a TODAY Show Read With Jenna Pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. It was also a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award and is a Goodreads Choice Award nominee.
Henríquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year. It was the Daily Beast Novel of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, an NPR Great Read, a Target Book of the Month selection, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by BookPage, Oprah.com, and School Library Journal. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Henriquez is also the author of The World In Half (a novel), and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection.
Cristina’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI, and the anthology This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers. Her work has been featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 and on Symphony Space Selected Shorts.
Her non-fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Real Simple, The Oxford American, and Preservation, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant.
She is the 2024 recipient of the 21st Century Award given by The Chicago Public Library Foundation, was a 2020 Fiction judge for the National Book Awards, has been a guest on National Public Radio, and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father.
Cristina earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.