Photo by Pedro Portal

Fabiola Santiago is the author of Reclaiming Paris, the story of a Miami woman who searches for her lost island and her identity through her relationships with men. The debut novel was published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books in September, 2008, and will be re-issued in paperback and in the Spanish-language edition, Siempre París, in August of 2009.

Fabiola is a columnist at The Miami Herald, where she has worked since 1980. She also is the author of essays, poetry and short fiction.

Her essay, The Science of Ghost Hunting, is featured in the Hyperion anthology, The Empty Nest: 31 Parents Tell the Truth about Relationships, Love, and Freedom After the Kids Fly the Coop. Another essay, The Year of Dreaming: A Tale of Two Quinceañeras, is included in the Rayo/HarperCollins anthology Fifteen Candles.

Her newspaper stories and essays on Cuban culture, arts, and identity have been published in many U.S. newspapers and magazines, and in Latin America, Canada and France. Her first fictional children’s story, Citizen Carmen, about a Cuban girl’s struggles to learn English, was published in the prestigious Highlights for Children, and has been reprinted several times in scholastic texts.

At The Miami Herald Media Company, Fabiola has been a writer and an editor. She was the founding city editor of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, where she shared a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Hurricane Andrew. At The Herald, she shared in a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez story, and her feature writing has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

A graduate of the University of Florida, she is a mother of three.

Fabiola was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in the spring of 1959, three months after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before her parents fled to Miami on a Freedom Flight in 1969, she spent her summers digging her feet into the softest sands in the world, frolicking in the bluest beach, Varadero. She grew up enamored of her family’s stories and her native city’s cultural legacy as “the Athens of Cuba,” the birthplace of poets and artists. She lives in Miami.