Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer, professor of creative writing at the University of Miami, and author of five books, including Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize. She is also the author of It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, and the novel The Veins of the Ocean, which won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.