Matias Travieso-Diaz is a former engineer and attorney who, following retirement, redirected his efforts towards fiction writing. He lives with his daughter and two dogs in the Washington, D.C. area. He describes himself as an "Animal Farm's goat, Packers and Barça fan, and lover of opera, classical theater, jazz, Italian food and vino."Born in Cuba, Matias migrated to the United States as a young man. He took up creative writing eight years ago and, since that time, he has authored a great number of short stories, over two hundred of which have been published or accepted for publication in short story anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. He has completed three novels: The Taíno Women, set in Cuba's early colonial period; The Travels of Lázaro Serrano, set in Cuba and Jamaica in 1762-63; and When Cubans Went to War, dealing with the backdrop for Cuba's ten-year war of independence in the Nineteenth Century. He is working on a fourth novel that takes Cuba's history to its final independence in 1902.