Ann is a Nuyorican, Vermont-based author with an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). She comes from a long line of Puerto Rican writers, including father and son poets Virgilio and José Antonio Dávila, and her cousin, award-winning fiction writer Tere Dávila.
Ann’s first book was a young adult horror novel titled Five Midnights, released by Tor Teen in 2019. Five Midnights won the 2020 International Latino Book Award in the category of Best Young Adult Fantasy & Adventure, an AudioFile’s Earphones Award for the audiobook, and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. The story continues in Category Five released in 2020. Category Five was a 2021 finalist for the same International Latino Book Award category. And her young adult horror rom-com, Breakup From Hell, was released by HarperCollins in January 2023. Her next YA novel, a horror comedy titled You’ve Awoken Her, will be coming in summer of 2025.
Ann’s middle grade debut, Hispanic Star: Bad Bunny, was co-written with activist Claudia Romo Edelman, and will be released September 3, 2024 from Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan.
Her first adult novel, the Puerto Rican magical realist mystery The Storyteller’s Death, was released from Sourcebooks Landmark on October 4, 2022, and won the 2023 International Latino Book Award in the category of Popular Fiction. Her second adult novel, We Need No Wings, will be released on September 10, 2024.Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology from HarperCollins, Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic from Polis Books and the Latine young adult collection Our Shadows Have Claws from Workman Publishing.
Ann lives in Vermont with her husband in a lovely little house with a massively creepy basement.
SESSION INFO:
Sunday, October 6, 10:00am at Saratoga Arts: Heritage-Inspired Fiction with Ann Dávila Cardinal, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, & Shawntelle Madison
Books
About We Need No Wings
"We need more novels that deepen our understanding of these later stages of a woman’s life and put wings of hope on our hearts. The book soars, her best so far, a transcendent read." ―Julia Alvarez, internationally bestselling and award-winning author
To be free, we must learn to fly.
Tere Sanchez has always known who she was: a professor, a wife, a mother, and a friend. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university, Tere hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead, she spends a year consumed by grief.
Until the day she levitates.
Suddenly, Tere's life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she's reminded that her family is related to the renowned levitating mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found. Tere will soon have to decide whether to remain shrouded in her grief, or open her heart to a world where we need no wings to fly…
From the award-winning author of The Storyteller's Death comes a riveting, multicultural story about what it means to love, heal, and take flight.