SONIA RIVERA-VALDÉS (Cuba), is a writer, literary and film critic, and a professor of Spanish Language and Literature at York College. She was born in Cuba, and now lives in New York. In January of 1997, she won the Casa de Las Américas literary prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Latin America, with Las historias prohibidas de Marta Veneranda (The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda), a book of short stories about the intimate lives of Latino immigrants in New York.