Anna Lapera is a Latina-Filipina writer and middle school ESL teacher whose mission is to teach students to stand up for themselves and against harassment. She was born in Guatemala to a Guatemalan mother and a Hawaiian-Filipino-German father, and raised all over the world. As a child of immigrants, her background drives her writing, which spans identities and geographies. She formed her own feminist identity in schools filled with micro-aggressions against girls, and at the heart of all her stories is the experience of girls fighting against injustice, always at the cusp of something great.
She was a 2021 Las Musas mentee under the mentorship of e.E. Charlton Trujillo. She is a recipient of the 2022 Kweli Color of Children’s Literature Conference scholarship, as well as the Diversity Scholarship to the 2022 Storymakers Conference. Having worked many years in the OSHA Office of International Affairs and Department of Labor, Anna has been a labor rights professional focusing on domestic violence- and child labor- and human trafficking-prevention; housing and income for immigrant families; equal pay for women agricultural workers; land use development and cultural preservation; and youth empowerment for Indigenous communities in Peru and in the Southwest. She has two Master's Degrees from the University of New Mexico, in Latin American Studies and in Community and Regional Planning.
She lives in Maryland with her family. She writers middle grade and young adult fiction, as well as short fiction for the grown folks.
Her debut middle grade novel MANI SEMILLA FINDS HER QUETZAL VOICE is forthcoming from Levine Querido on March 5, 2024.
