The Fourth of July and Cuban Women

[Sandokan]

Carmen is an internationally known storyteller represented in multiple American Folklife Center collections. She has appeared many times at the National Book Festival. She is host of the four-time Emmy-winning children’s program, Love That Book!, and has won numerous awards for her personal stories and children's books:

2008 Best Children's Books of the Year, Bank Street College of Education; Society of School Librarians International Book Awards; Society of School Librarians International Book Awards; Irma Simonton and James H. Black Award for the Best Picture Book of the Year; International Latino Book Awards; Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature.

2009 Children's Book Award, Florida Reading Association; Storytelling World Resource Awards.

2010 Volunteer State Book Awards; Texas Bluebonnet Award.

2011 Texas Bluebonnet Award

2012 Cybil award in the Science Fiction & Fantasy category; Middle Reader Honor Award list; Bluestem Award

2013 EMMY award

2014 Young Hoosier Book Award; Audie Award; Charlie May Simon Children's Book Award; South Dakota Children's Book Awards

2015 Georgia Children’s Book Award Nominnee.

2016 Patricia Gallagher Children's Choice Picture Book Award

2017 Amazon Best Books of the Year; Fanfare 2017 Best Books of the Year for Children and Teens; New York and Chicago Public Libraries Best Books of 2017; Huffington Post Best Picture Books.

2018 Florida Sunshine State Young Readers’ Award Master List; Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year.

2019 Georgia Children’s Book Award Masterlist; Rhode Island Children’s Book Award Masterlist

2022 Best Children's Picture Books of the Year in Spanish

2023 Tejas Star Reading List

 

[Sandokan]

Katheryn Fernandez Rundle

Early Life

Katherine Fernandez Rundle was born on March 1, 1950, in Washington, D.C. Her parents move to Miami Florida around 1964. She was sent to Barcelona, Spain where she study in a catholic high school run by nuns. Her father, Carlos Benito Fernandez, was the first Cuban-borne judge in the U.S. He served as Miami’s first Hispanic judge and a founder of the Cuban American Bar Association (CABA). Her mother Marylou Fitzgibbons Fernandez was a Miami-Dade County Public Schools teacher.

 

[Sandokan]

After coming back from Spain, Katherine went to the University of Miami and graduate with a bachelor’s degree, then she pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, in England, where she earned a graduate degree in criminology, and a law degree in 1976. After coming back from England, she began her career as a prosecutor working for Janet Reno in 1977, then the Miami-Dade State Attorney.

Katherine legal journey had its roots with her father, Cuban immigrant Carlos Benito Fernandez. She says: “My father would take me to his law office, and I would go to court with him, meet governors, and he exposed me to the world of problem solving,” When my mother found out I was having twins, she said, ‘That’s it, I’ll take care of them.’ I moved two blocks from where my mother and father lived. She raised twin boys, one now a lawyer, Justin Rundle and the other a singer and songwriter, Evan Rundle, born on December 1983.

 

[Sandokan]

Katherine Fernandez served as an Assistant State attorney for 15 years in her role as Chief Assistant to then-State Attorney Janet Reno. She fallows in her father’s footsteps when her peers elected her CABA’s first female president in 1991. When Reno was appointed attorney general in 1993, she was appointed State Attorney and became the first Hispanic female state attorney in Florida. In 1994, residents electing her as the first Cuban American State Attorney in Miami-Dade County and the State of Florida. She has been re-elected to eight terms as the county’s top law enforcement officer.

 

[Sandokan]

Katherine Fernandez office in the 1990s was the first in Florida to establish a drug court and a domestic violence unit, and the majority of law on domestic violence was either authored or advocated by her office. She operates a Child Support Enforcement Office, with over 65,000 cases processed annually by her staff. In 2006, she created the "Second Chance" Seal and Expunge Program. Monthly workshops held in different parts of the county offer free assistant to eligible ex-offenders. In 2012 she created a broad coalition of law enforcement agencies and community services to combat human trafficking, and in 2017 created the Miami-Dade Veterans Court. She has been Miami-Dade's top prosecutor for three decades and in 2025, she was reelected again.

 

[Sandokan]

Lourdes Gil

Early Life

Lourdes Gil was born on 1950 in Havana, Cuba and as sent to the U.S. by her parents in 1961 as part of the Pedro Pan children’s exodus program. Her passion for writing became manifest at an early age during her years in elementary school at the Colegio del Apostolado in Havana. She was sent to New York, where she went to high school and her passion for writing continuous to grow.

 

[Sandokan]

Education

After finishing high school, Lourdes studied literature at Saint Peter’s College, a Jesuit institution, in Jersey City, New Jersey. After that, she went to Spain where she studied Hispanic language and literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, and earned an undergraduate degree in 1973, and in 1974 obtain a Bachelor of Art from Fordham University, New York City. In 1978, she obtained a Master of Arts in Hispanic Language and Literature from New York University.