Author
Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo is a USA Today bestselling, Bram Stoker Award–winning, and International Latino Book Award–winning author and poet — the first Latina and the first Puerto Rican to win the Bram Stoker Award. She writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. …
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Cynthia Pelayo is a USA Today bestselling, Bram Stoker Award–winning, and International Latino Book Award–winning author and poet — the first Latina and the first Puerto Rican to win the Bram Stoker Award. She writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. Chicago is not her setting. Chicago is her cosmology.
She holds a Master of Science from Roosevelt University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is pursuing a PhD in English. In 2026 she completed the Odyssey Writing Workshop and was in residence at Ragdale.
She is the author of Lotería, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, Forgotten Sisters, Vanishing Daughters, and It Came From Neverland, as well as dozens of standalone stories and poems.