Cecilia Fernandez
Education:
- M.F.A. Florida International University
- M.A. University of Miami
English instructor Cecilia M. Fernandez is the author of a collection of short stories, Grieving for Guava (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and Leaving Little Havana: A Memoir of Miami’s Cuban Ghetto (Beating Windward Press, 2014) winner of the 2015 International Latino Book Awards (Most Inspirational Nonfiction Book). Her memoir was selected as a top ten nonfiction book by a Latino author (2015) and a finalist in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Book Contest (2011).
On Nova’s adjunct faculty staff since 2012, Ms. Fernandez has published in Latina Magazine, Accent Miami, Upstairs at the Duroc: the Paris Workshop Journal, Vista Magazine, Le Siecle de George Sand and Day One, A Literary Journal.
A former reporter for The Stockton Record, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Miami television stations WPBT, WSVN, WSCV, and WLTV, she covered the state legislature, the National Democratic Convention, local and presidential elections, Operation Desert Storm, Hurricane Andrew, the drug trafficking trial of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, the Mariel boatlift, and the Miami riots among many other stories. She believes her best reporting – and writing – happened while covering the lives of marginalized people living in the ethnic neighborhoods of California and Florida.
Ms. Fernandez is an Emmy nominee from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; she received Dartmouth University’s Champion Tuck Award (Honorable Mention for Television), the Scripps-Howard Award: News Writer of the Month and a Fellowship for Independent Summer Study from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and an MA in English Literature from the University of Miami. Her undergraduate degrees in journalism and social science are from the University of California-Berkeley.
She lives in Weston, Florida.