April Dávila

April Davila is a fourth-generation Californian: her maternal ancestors founded a dairy farm near Sacramento in the 1880s, while her father’s relatives moved to California from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl that ravaged the U.S. prairies in 1930–1936. Davila lived for a time in Ecuador and on the Marshall Islands, and visited Caribbean countries, but felt no better anywhere than in her native California.

After graduating from school, she studied marine biology at Scripps College, but soon gave up her dream of becoming a serious scientist, as she was not prepared to spend many years in a laboratory. Unemployed and pregnant, she began writing in 2007. At the time, she and her husband were living in a Stanford dormitory.

When their daughter was born, they moved to a suburb of Los Angeles. At the same time, April’s long-standing desire to become a writer, which had been with her since childhood, finally took shape. She enrolled at the University of Southern California and graduated while pregnant with their second child.

After two years of working as a freelance copywriter, Davila took a job as a technical writer at an engineering company. In 2016, April decided to quit and focus on her creative work. She wrote her debut novel, 142 Ostriches, in 2018. In 2019, her short story “Ultra” was nominated for the American literary award Pushcart.