Ivonne Lamazares was born in Havana and migrated to Miami at the age of 13. She is the author of two novels, The Tilting House (Counterpoint, 2025), and The Sugar Island (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001) which was translated into seven languages.
The Tilting House was awarded a President’s Medal by the 2026 Florida Authors and Publishers’ Association (FAPA) Book Awards for general fiction and was long listed for the 2025 REFORMA National Book Award.
Lamazares’ fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Latina magazine, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida, Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for fiction and three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships. She lives with her husband, poet Steve Kronen, in South Miami.
Praise for The Sugar Island
“Ivonne Lamazares’s fresh, clear voice and lyrical vision of Cuba past and present are a welcome addition to the New American Literature…of migration and exile, of disintegration and reintegration, of mournful memory and redemptive new beginnings, and The Sugar Island is situated exactly at the center of it.”
Russell Banks
“Writing of mothers and daughters in a world torn apart by politics, Ivonne Lamazares offers a dazzling new addition to Cuban-American literature.”
Mary Morris
“The Sugar Island is contemporary fiction at its best, prizewinning fiction, and Ivonne Lamazares is an unforgettable writer.”
Bob Shacoshis
“Ivonne Lamazares is one of the most original and exciting new voices on the literary scene. Born and raised in Cuba, she writes of her homeland with unmatched authenticity, immediacy, and poetry.”
Janet Silver