Dariel Suarez is a Cuban-born writer who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997, during the economic crisis known as The Special Period. His story collection, A Kind of Solitude, was selected as the winner of the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books. Dariel is the Director of Core Programs and Faculty at GrubStreet and one of City of Boston’s inaugural Artist Fellows. His writing has received honors or awards from The Caribbean Writer, Glimmer Train, and Nimrod International’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. His prose has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Third Coast, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Dariel holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Boston University.