Christina García was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1958, but her family moved to the US the next year when Fidel Castro came to power. García pursued a career in journalism, eventually becoming "Time" magazine's bureau chief in the Caribbean region. In the 1990's she left journalism to write fiction full time. García's first novel, "Dreaming in Cuban," was published in 1992 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book follows three generations of a Cuban family through their lives in Cuba and in exile throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Regarded as an important Cuban-American voice, García often finds herself at odds with the Cuban community both in the US and in Cuba because she has never participated in anti-Castro activities. Her early work focused on the Cuban-American experience, but in recent years her fiction's scope has expanded, embracing the experiences of outsiders in many different cultures.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
