Until We're Fish

Awarded the Gold Medal for Best Historical Fiction in the 2021 International Latino Book Awards and the Nautilus Book Award for Fiction, and nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Book Award for Debut Novels. 
 

Past winners of the International Latino Book Award include Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Oscar Hijuelos, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Pablo Neruda.
Nautilus Awards honor "Better Books for a Better World," and the core mission of the Nautilus Awards is to celebrate and honor books that support positive social change, social justice, conscious living and spiritual growth.
 

Other distinguished Nautilus Award winners include Barbara Kingsolver, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamott, Louise Erdrich, Desmond Tutu and Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Andrew Weil, and Malala Yousafzai.
                                                                                                                                      "Historically vibrant and sadly exquisite, Until We're Fish renders a poetic and cinematic view of Cuba through the lens of loves--familial love, romantic love, patriotic love--and their complex intersections, all beautifully and uniquely told through this compelling story centered on lives that make history come alive."  RICHARD BLANCO, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

An unforgettable coming-of-age story, Until We're Fish blends the romance, violence, mood, and ethos of the Cuban Revolution with a young man's hopeless and heroic first love. With the truth of experience and the lyricism of poetry, Rodríguez Drissi constructs an exquisite, gossamer tale of revolution and hearts set adrift. A Don Quixote for our times, Until We're Fish is an intimate exploration into the souls of people willing to sacrifice everything to be free.

SUSANNAH RODRÍGUEZ DRISSI is an award-winning writer, translator, and scholar. Her poetry, prose, and academic papers have appeared in journals and anthologies such as In Season: Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places in Between, which won the 2018 Florida Book Award; the Los Angeles Review of Books; Saw Palm; Literal Magazine; Diario de Cuba; SX Salon; Raising Mothers; the Acentos Review; and Cuba Counterpoints, among many others. Her plays have been performed in Los Angeles and Miami, and she is currently at work on Nocturno, a musical. Rodríguez Drissi is the author of The Latin Poet's Guide to the Cosmos (Floricanto Press, 2019) and is on the faculty of the Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles.