About

Photo by Jemimah Wei 

Short Bio:

Yohanca Delgado is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her recent fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Her recent essays appear in TIME, The Believer, and New York Times Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the 2019 Clarion workshop. 

Nice to meet you! Born and raised in New York, I am the daughter of immigrants from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. I am a proud alumna of Prep for Prep and Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

For most of my post-collegiate life, I have lived overseas. Between 2008 – 2011, I lived and worked in Paris, Cairo, and San Paolo. From 2011 and 2016, I lived and worked in Kyiv and Vilnius. I am a native Spanish speaker and have studied French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian.

In the summer of 2016, I relocated to Maryland, where I earned an MFA in creative writing from American University. During my time there, I was the editor-in-chief of AU’s Cafe MFA and the creative nonfiction editor of FOLIO . I also began teaching writing.

Since then, I’ve taught creative writing and guest lectured at the Stanford Hume Center, One Story’s Summer Lecture Series, Arizona University’s “Desert Nights, Rising Stars” conference, Kweli’s International Literary Festival, Tin House’s Craft Intensives, and Stanford University Continuing Studies. I’ve also delivered creativity and craft conversations for high school, college, MFA classes, and alumni events.

Writing is solitary work in many ways, but I’ve been extremely fortunate to find support in a number of wonderful literary organizations. I’m ever-grateful to have received fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, The National Book Critics Circle, The Periplus Collective, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Clarion Foundation, the New York State Writers Institute, the Indiana Review Writers Workshop, the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, where I was a Peter Taylor Fellow for Fiction and had the honor of working with the brilliant AJ Verdelle in 2018.

Although I am primarily focused on fiction these days, my other loves include nonfiction, poetry, literary translation, and criticism. I was a 2021 Emerging Critic at the National Book Critics Circle. I’m also passionate about fairy tales, mythology, and children’s literature. 

For more about me, check out this interview with the lovely folks at Radix. Check out what I’m reading (and support indie bookstores!) here.