Anika Fajardo

Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. Her debut middle-grade novel What If a Fish (Simon & Schuster, 2020) was awarded the 2021 Minnesota Book Award. Her latest book for young readers, Meet Me Halfway (Simon & Schuster, 2022), is a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award. She is also the author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Book (Nonfiction) of 2020 from City Pages and was a finalist for the 2020 Minnesota Book Award. Fajardo also wrote Encanto: A Tale of Three Sisters, the middle-grade tie-in novel for the Disney film Encanto. Her short YA fiction is forthcoming in Boundless: Twenty Voices Celebrating Multicultural and Multiracial Identities. She teaches creative writing at Augsburg University’s MFA program, and lives with her family in Minneapolis.