Ann Dávila Cardinal (she/her)

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 on June 17, 2025.

Ann’s middle grade debut, Hispanic Star: Bad Bunny, was cowritten with activist Claudia Romo Edelman, and was 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, came out 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.

Ann Dávila Cardinal is represented by literary agent Linda Camacho of Gallt & Zacker and film agent Becca Rodriguez at Grandview Entertainment.