Anna Surinyach was born in Georgetown Texas in a family that had immigrated to New Orleans many years before she was five. Her mother, a seamstress by trade, became a Cuban-American in the New Orleans Mardi Gras district. Anna attended grammar school with the children of her friends and they all teased her about her dark, wispy hair. The one person who could help her overcome her inferiority complex was her good friend, Miguel Trujillo. The two grew up together in Georgetown, performing the traditional “ros Aviados” – walking in the footsteps of their family members, going to parades, celebrating when they won something at school or made some new friends.
When Anna was thirteen years old, her family immigrated to San Antonio and moved into an old house on Avenida Avenue where Anna quickly became friends with some of the other Latin American students from the boarding school down the street. The school year ended, but Anna continued to maintain her friendships with her friends until high school graduation. She remembers one of her friends, Jose Lopez, a decorated athlete on the soccer team, was always talking to her about something he had seen at the zoo. He urged her to get an understanding of the language so that she could be able to talk about it with her friends back home in Puerto Rico. She did just that and from that point on, began studying Spanish, reading the works of writers such as Hernan Cortes, Hector Ayala, Jose Ramirez Nieves, Ignacio Ovallos, and others, in order to improve her vocabulary and to begin reading Spanish newspapers in the original, simple, and easy to understand the tone of the language.
She graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in English literature and then went on to become an award-winning writer. She has worked as an assignment editor for the Wall Street Journal, a copy editor for the Los Angeles Times, a fiction author, and as a magazine writer. Her first book was entitled “The Cible” which won the National Book Award for her second book. Now she has written eight books in her popular series entitled Anna Surinyach: An English Woman’s Poet, which is on its third edition. Anna Surinyach has written over forty books for publishers such as Random House, Penguin, Basic Books, Crown Publishers, and others. Her works have been translated into thirty languages.