Author Interview: ‘Abuelita’s Gift: A Día de Muertos Story’ by Mariana Ríos Ramírez

In the opening of Abuelita’s Gift: A Día de Muertos Story, a young girl named Julieta peeks inside a box containing skeletons and the traditional Mexican decorative craft known as papel picado.

She asks her family if Abuelita is really coming home. “Yes!” her mother replies. “Our ancestors’ souls will visit us on Día de Muertos.”

Excited by the plan to honor her late grandmother, Julieta sets out on a personal quest to find a special gift to offer on the traditional Mexican holiday. It’s important for her to find a gift that would make Abuelita smile, and demonstrate how much she is missed.

In Mariana Ríos Ramírez’s new picture book (out now from Knopf Books for Young Readers), the Mexican author brings readers a beautiful and open-hearted story about the deep and never-ending love between a child and her grandmother. As Julieta struggles to find the best gift, she recalls memories she shared with Abuelita: of her grandmother’s hands lacing flowers into crowns, for example. Illustrations by Mexican award-winning illustrator Sara Palacios add tremendous warmth to a book that is mostly joyful because it’s about love and connection between generations.

And when Julieta finds the special gift, she learns that it’s much deeper than a tangible object. It’s what’s embedded within.

Ríos Ramírez recently spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind Abuelita’s Gift (also out in Spanish as El regalo de abuelita), her personal ties to Día de Muertos, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Abuelita’s Gift: A Día de Muertos Story. I know you’re from Mexico and now live in the U.S. Growing up in Mexico, what was your relationship to Día de Muertos?

Mariana Ríos Ramírez (MRR): I grew up in Mexico, and Día de Muertos was always in my life, but not in my home. My parents are from Chihuahua, in the north of Mexico, and they didn’t grow up with the tradition because it is not as strong in the north as it is in the center or the south. We moved to Toluca when I was six, so in school we would set up ofrendas and exchange calaveritas with our classmates. There are also these poems called calaveritas that I remember we had to write as assignments. So it was in my life like that, but at home we didn’t set up ofrendas. I remember my parents would take me to this Día de Muertos market in Toluca called Feria del Alfeñique. It’s really famous during the month of October. I went there several times; you can buy skeletons, calaveritas, and candies. It’s very traditional and something to do about Día de Muertos.

When I came to live in the US, I wanted my kids to have a connection to Mexico and to our family. Right now we are the only ones here. (At the time) my son was five and my daughter was two – and suddenly there was this language barrier for them. They were missing home, missing family, so Día de Muertos allowed us to have an activity to do together. It was a celebration to set up the ofrenda, to talk about our ancestors, and to talk about our grandparents that my kids didn’t get to know. It became something that we started doing every year, that we all loved. Sharing about family is something that I really liked. I thought that the tradition was beautiful, and I wanted to share it with other children. So that’s why I ended up writing the book. It’s been an honor, truly, to be able to share that part of my culture through the book.

AC: Your story follows a young girl named Julieta as she struggles to find the best way to honor her late abuelita on the holiday. How did you create this character?

MRR: When I started drafting this story, at first it was nonfiction because it was more about explaining the elements of an ofrenda. My critique partners were like, ‘Well, it’s interesting, but there’s not a story.’ There was no character arc or anything. It was more like a description of the tradition. That made me think, so I changed it, which took me a while because I was learning how to write picture books at the time. This was one of my first drafts. So for a time, I couldn’t make it work. I put it aside. I wrote other things. And I came back to it because I really liked it. 

My grandma was still alive when I was working on this story. And as I said, living here (in the US) and far away from my kids’ grandparents also had to do with it. Because those are the feelings of longing – of missing. And even though my grandmother was alive back then, the feelings of my children missing their grandparents in Mexico were there. Since I was writing a book for kids, I put those feelings in Julieta. And given that the book is about Día de Muertos, it made sense to come up with an Abuelita who was going to be the relative that Julieta missed, because I think that it’s the closest relative sometimes for children that are older.

Julieta has the name of my grandma. And a lot of parts of the story have to do with my own memories. Many characters have the names of my uncles or my grandfather. So there are a lot of things that are very personal in the book.

AC: One thing I loved about your story is how you teach readers about the holiday. For example, readers learn about the setting up of an ofrenda. As you wrote this story, what did you envision showing readers about the holiday?

MRR: As you mentioned, the readers can see how this family specifically is celebrating Día de Muertos. I also felt that it was going to be in the background, because the main plot is Julieta looking for the gift. But as we follow her, she is remembering. And that’s so crucial of Día de Muertos: remembering those moments that you had together with your loved ones. That’s actually how Julieta is trying to find the inspiration for the right gift, by going back to those moments of connection and love with Abuelita. I think Sara Palacios did a great job of showing that, because that’s what built their relationship. That’s how we get to understand that pain and that love that Julieta is feeling because of Abuelita’s death. 

I wanted to show, but I didn’t explain, Why the ofrenda? What does it mean? How do we celebrate in Mexico? So I am showing it through the illustrations and as the story progresses, and that’s why it was very important for me to have an author’s note. It was crucial to have an opportunity to talk more in depth about the holiday, and how there’s not just one way to celebrate it. In different regions of Mexico, families do different things. Ofrendas look different from one state to another. 

For me it was important to clarify that, and also to say that not everybody that lives in Mexico celebrates Día de Muertos. Not everybody celebrates in the same way. Not everybody believes that our loved ones come to visit for the night. So there are many things that are very specific, and I am so grateful that I was able to go into more detail in the author’s note. And also in the last spread, with the ofrenda diagram that tells the readers what the meaning is of everything that we put in the ofrenda. I think that’s just beautiful, knowing that everything has a meaning and a symbolism because this is a pre-Hispanic tradition that has lasted for generations to our times. I feel so grateful that I was able to do that without being too didactic as I told the story.

“....And that’s so crucial of Día de Muertos: remembering those moments that you had together with your loved ones”

AC: The heart of this story, to me, is about the deep connection we have with our loved ones, especially those who have passed on. And how it’s possible and a great thing to still honor them. What is the heart of the story to you, as the author?

MRR: For me, the heart is Julieta realizing that the love with Abuelita never ends. That she can be connected with her. And for readers, too. It’s important to me that we can all still feel that love and connection with our loved ones – even if they are not physically around us – if we hold onto the memories and if we hold onto sharing their stories. For that, we need to know them first. But if we can do that, then that’s the way that people really live on. 

That’s why, for me, it was important to start celebrating Día de Muertos with my children, so that the people I love will live on through them in their stories.That they can talk about my mom or my grandma later with their kids, even if they didn’t get to know my grandma. I think that’s what’s beautiful about this celebration; to honor family and love and those connections, knowing that they never end. So I think it’s very hopeful.

AC: The book was illustrated by Sara Palacios, who is also Mexican and has illustrated many children’s books. What do you think her illustrations add to Julieta’s story?

MRR: Sara is super talented, and I am very grateful and I feel so lucky that she was part of the team. The fact that she’s Mexican made it easier. I remember at the beginning, I had a lot of illustration notes. When she came to the project, they were no longer needed because she understands the tradition. 

I remember my editor told me that she considered Sara to be really good at showing sadness and at showing joy. And that’s exactly what this book is about. It’s about finding the joy in honoring those that have passed away and that left a hole in our hearts. And she does a great job. I don’t know about you, but I tear up looking at the illustrations. She is just great. I think that she added a lot of warmth, a lot of emotion, and even more heart to the story than what the text had already.

AC: There’s a scene in the book where you write that Julieta’s eyes teared up as another memory came to mind. And the image is of Julieta placing flowers on her abuelita’s casket. It was perhaps the most somber moment in the book, because the story really begins with a child's excitement to honor her abuela. Why was it important for you to include that scene?

MRR: Día de Muertos Muertos is a holiday that celebrates the lives of our ancestors, but of course we’re celebrating them because they are no longer here and have passed away. And when someone we love passes away, that hurts. For me, it was important for children to understand that Abuelita had died, because I am sure that many of them have gone through something like that. It is important that they know that death is part of life, and that it hurts and changes our lives. In this case, Julieta stopped dancing for a while when she lost Abuelita. But (I hoped) that children also understand that with time, if you hold on to those memories and those good times, then you’re going to be fine. You’re going to find a way to still feel that love around you. 

So for me, it was important that they also know that death exists, that it’s real, that it’s part of life, and that it hurts. And that they can see the character go through that. I am sure that children that are going through hard moments like that can relate. But as you say, it’s something that is shown in the illustration. I think that the way in which the book presents it is somber, but you also didn’t need more words. The illustration is enough, and then showing on the other side how Julieta is feeling and how that impacted her life.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Abuelita’s Gift?

MRR: I hope that they get curious about their own family and ancestors. That they ask questions to their parents and grandparents about the past, so that they can better understand where they come from and can later tell their stories. What we discussed about how the love of family never ends, that’s something that I hope they can hold onto. For when the time comes, they might need it. 

And finally, just like Julieta, I hope they learn that the best gifts truly come from the heart. When that happens, it is a gift not only for the person that is receiving it, in the case of Abuelita, but also for the giver, like Julieta – who found the gift that is for Abuelita and herself. 

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Mariana Ríos Ramírez is a Mexican author living in Anderson, South Carolina. She worked as a high school teacher and co-owned an online business before discovering her passion for writing. Mariana is a member of SCBWI, Storyteller Academy, Rate your Story, and Las Musas.

Sara Palacios was the recipient of the 2012 Pura Belpré Illustrator Honor Award for her work on Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match. A native of Mexico, Sara graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City and went on to earn BFA and MFA degrees in illustration from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She illustrates for companies in both the United States and Mexico.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Q&A: ‘Libertad’ by Bessie Flores Zaldívar

Bessie Flores Zaldívar immediately places the readers in Libertad’s setting with the opening lines: “This fucking city,” and traps us in an overcrowded car along with the characters. The night is hot and loud, and Libertad and her friends have a party to go to. However, they are stopped by a cop and must bribe him if they don’t want to end up in jail. Libi, as her loved ones call her, is stuck under the pressure of her best friend Camila’s weight and vanilla smell as they wait for the driver to deal with the corrupted officer. 

They finally arrive at La Esquina, the bar where Libi and her friends usually go despite being underage, and the party begins. They dance and drink for hours, and suddenly Libertad and Camila can’t find the rest of the group in the crowd. When two older men try to dance with them, Camila pulls her friend inside the bathroom. Libertad’s mind is all over the place because she is drunk, but she comes back to the present when Camila’s lips touch hers. As the kiss intensifies, outside is Maynor, Libi’s older brother, looking for her desperately. The cops are in La Esquina looking for minors. When he gets to the bathroom door and interrupts the two best friends, will Libi be relieved that Maynor found them before the cops? Or will she wish he never knocked? 

In the prologue of their novel, Flores Zaldívar lets us know Libertad is about two things that are, as the author says, “inextricable from each other”: queerness and Honduras. They place us right next to Libi and we follow along as she discovers key things about herself and her country. The readers accompany Libertad through a year of growth where she must face hardships no 17-year-old should, but many do—especially queer Latin-American youth. 

Libertad inevitably becomes important to the reader and everything she experiences—Honduras’s hot summers, siblings love, mother-daughter arguments, grief, injustice—feels tangible. Each chapter is a page-turner, and readers eagerly follow Libi’s both painful and healing journey. 

Flores Zaldívar spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the process of writing Libertad.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Roxanna Cardenas Colmenares (RCC): Congratulations on your debut novel Libertad, Bessie! With your book being about growth and overcoming adversity, can you tell me about yourself in your early twenties writing this story? Did younger Bessie ever imagine this moment you are experiencing now?

Bessie Flores Zaldívar (BFZ): I started writing this novel in my second year of college when I was 20. I wrote a lot of it but only used the first three chapters to apply to the MFA, and this was my thesis at the end of it. When I finished the first full draft, I was 24 years old. Toni Morrison said that she wrote her first novel because she wanted to read a book like that and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think that is very much so why I wrote Libertad because I wanted to read a queer YA novel about a Honduran person, and I wanted it to engage with the political context. I also really wanted to see a family like mine depicted, and the family in this book is almost exactly like mine. So, this was the book I needed to write before anything else. In some ways that made it very easy, but in others, that made it very hard. Still, the book came to me very gracefully, like a gift. 

RCC: As an older sister, one of my favorite things about this book was the relationship between Libertad and her brothers. The bond between her and Maynor is key to this story, and you write it from the perspective of a younger sibling despite you being the oldest one in your family. Why did you choose to write from the point of view of a middle child and how did your own experience as an oldest sibling help you write this dynamic between Libi, Maynor, and Alberto? 

BFZ: Great question! The plot reason Libertad is a middle child is that I needed Maynor to be a student activist, and for that to be true, he needed to be of college age, which means he had to be older than Libi. Beyond that, queer young adults felt to me like a good place to grieve. I was telling my siblings that, as a queer person, when I came out in high school, I was the only person who was out, so a lot of it was that I wanted to reimagine what my youth could’ve been like if I had an older sibling, how that could’ve changed things for me. 

I love being an older sibling. I feel truly so lucky and blessed, but I also have always wondered what that could have been like for me, having someone who I really trusted and looked up to tell me it would be okay. How braver would I have been? I think that was key to my decision. Also, a lot of the grief depicted in the book comes from the things Maynor knows that Libertad doesn’t get to know and that we get to see from the chapters that I wrote from his perspective. 

Writing the dynamic was probably the easiest part. I would say it is a direct replica of the one I have with my siblings. 

RCC: Honduras is another character in this story. The book can’t exist without Honduras in the background. Tell me how it was to recall the quirks and corners of your home country while writing Libertad, especially from outside of it. 

BFZ: It was like being haunted. Especially because I was writing a Honduras I remembered living in but that wasn’t there anymore, and when I got to go home, things were different. La Esquina, the bar in the first three chapters, is the same one I would go to when I was in high school, and now it’s a Puerto Rican restaurant. It felt like I was trying to remember something that had become a ghost because my country is changing and there is nothing I can do about that since I’m the one who left. I’m the one who remembers it differently. In some ways, it was really pleasurable to process that grief of Honduras never being mine in the same way that it was before I left… I love Honduras, and what “Honduras” means to me is the people who live in that land. 

RCC: Your book also depicts the experience of closeted queers and, more specifically, the consequences of being outed. At the same time, the story takes place in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, an environment that was especially dangerous to queer youth at the time. How was it for you to write those painful moments Libertad had to face regarding her sexuality? What did you wish to tell young queer people with them, to both those who live in settings like Libi does and those who don’t? 

BFZ: I’ve been thinking about that a little bit because I knew I was queer pretty much as soon as I knew who I was, as soon as I understood myself, and I never really felt shame about it, even though I did grow up in such a homophobic country and society…When people come out, moms tend to say things like: “Your life is going to be hard,” which is what my mom said to me, along with “I don’t want your life to be harder than it needs to be. We already live in this country, you’re already a woman in this country. Why does it have to be any harder?” I never had a good answer for that until maybe two weeks ago. I realized that what I wanted to say in response was that my life would be harder, but I was raised by two very strong women. I saw my mom survive the same stuff Libertad’s mom did, so how could I not be strong enough to face what was coming? And I have been. 

A friend told me that when we ask God–or whatever we believe in–She doesn’t give us a little bottle of “Liquid Bravery;” you are just put in a situation where you can choose to be brave. That is what I wanted to put across to young readers, that being brave is just deciding to be so. I know there are issues to consider, such as safety, and the United States is not immune to this, but I now feel like the novel helped me find an answer to that moment in my life. Yes, my life will be harder, and I’ll have to be strong because it is more important to live my life authentically than to make it easier by shrinking myself. I’m so queer, so out, so happy… It was worth it. How could it not be? 

“I saw my mom survive the same stuff Libertad’s mom did, so how could I not be strong enough to face what was coming?”

RCC: You made interesting choices in your novel like having little sections with a change of the narrator’s point of view that added more details to the story beyond Libertad’s awareness, yet the most notorious one for me was the use of Spanish throughout the novel, more specifically when it comes to Libertad’s poems. Why did you choose to keep her poetry in Spanish and add the translations to the back of the book?

BFZ: You are going to love this. It almost sounds made up, but all the poems in the book were written in Spanish by me and my brother. They were written before the book was. Those are old poems that we wrote when I was 19, which means that [my brother] was 17. We wrote them together as those specific moments in time [mentioned in LIBERTAD] were happening, and I just copied and pasted them into the book–I might have edited them a little bit. Therefore, I made that choice because the poems were written before the book, and it didn’t feel good to translate them… Ultimately, I think I just kept them in Spanish and the way they are because I wanted Emo, my brother, to get to read his work in my book. A lot of it is his and not mine, more rhymes are his than mine, and in many ways this book is a love letter to my brother and sister. 

RCC: In the same topic of choices, you could have chosen to tell a story focusing either on queerness or Honduran politics, but instead, you connected the two. Why was the depiction of this correlation so important? 

BFZ: The best answer for that is that I didn’t get to choose what affected me. I had to be affected by Honduran politics and be queer at the same time. They are also inextricable from each other. When the coup happened in 2009, I was twelve, and power got cut and there was all this military presence in the country, and we couldn’t go to school. I didn’t understand what was going on. Years later, when I was investigating it, I found out that a lot of people were killed that night, especially queer people, and what was found on the scene were military bullets that civilians don’t have access to… It wasn’t reported on the news. We’re talking about queer sex workers who got killed that night. I already knew the state wasn’t interested in protecting my livelihood as a person, but [this discovery] made me feel aware of how my queerness made me especially vulnerable to that truth. 

RCC: One more choice you made that I’m very curious about is your author’s letter at the end of the book. Why did you decide to write it? 

BFZ: I love that you’re asking me about this!... I didn’t want a book that gave a very simplistic answer about Honduran politics, and I don’t think the book does. But in my author’s note, I wanted to acknowledge that my reality is very different from Libertad’s now. I got to grow up, move somewhere else, and I know what being openly queer feels like, which she doesn’t. Also, there has been a change in power in Honduras since the end of that book… We had this historic election with the most participation ever, we elected the first woman president, and she’s from the left, but the next day, people still lived in the same conditions. One year later, people are still living in the same conditions. I really wanted to tell the reader that history did move past this, and it has meant something, but it also has meant nothing in other ways. The things that are true at the end of the book are still true today.

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Born in 1997 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer and professor of fiction. They’re currently based in the New Haven area. Libertad is Bessie’s debut novel.

Roxanna Cardenas Colmenares is a Venezuelan writer living in New York City who loves to consume, study, and create art. She explores multiple genres in her writing, with a special interest in horror and sci-fi, while working on her B.A. in English with a Creative Writing concentration. 

Her work has made her a two-time recipient of the James Tolan Student Writing Award for her critical essays analyzing movies. She has also won The Henry Roth Award in Fiction, The Esther Unger Poetry Prize, and The Allan Danzig Memorial Award in Victorian Literature.

In her free time, she likes to watch movies, dance, and draw doodles that she hopes to be brave enough to share one day.

Author Q&A: ‘Pencil & Eraser: We Have a Dull-Emma!’ by Jenny Alvarado

It’s the start of a new school year, and Pencil and Eraser face their first big dilemma. Pencil is dull. As in, her point is the opposite of sharp.

Pencil, who almost always exudes joy, panics. 

“What should I do?” she asks Eraser, a stout white-and-pink curmudgeon. 

“Sharpen up,” Eraser says.

“That is a great idea!” Pencil shouts, picking up Eraser for a hug.

So begins Pencil & Eraser: We Have a Dull-Emma! – the first book in a new early-reader graphic novel series by Jenny Alvarado. Out now from G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, this imaginative story is equal parts hilarious and endearing as readers join Pencil and Eraser on an epic adventure to find a sharpener. The author-illustrator threads in joke breaks in between some chapters for additional laughs. A special touch comes at the end, with tutorials from Alvarado on how young readers can draw Pencil and Eraser themselves.

The second book in the series – Pencil & Eraser: Lost and Frown! – is slated to release next year.

Latinx in Publishing spoke with Alvarado about how this series came to be, developing her memorable characters, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on Pencil & Eraser: We Have a Dull-Emma! What inspired this book?

Jenny Alvarado (JA): It started off as a picture book idea – completely different from what it is now. I had this idea of a very mean eraser that would erase everybody’s writing. And then it slowly transformed into an early reader (book). He’s still not nice, but he’s not as mean as he was in the picture book idea that I had. And he needed a character that would pretty much be the opposite of him, which became Pencil. She’s super joyful and exuberant.

AC: Now that you have the first book out from this series, do you look at your pencils and erasers the same?

JA: Oh no, they’re very different now. [Laughs] I was looking at the initial sketches of when I had the picture book idea, and even their design has changed completely. Their personalities, their design, everything changed from the initial idea.

“I had this idea of a very mean eraser that would erase everybody’s writing. And then it slowly transformed into an early reader (book). He’s still not nice, but he’s not as mean as he was in the picture book idea that I had.”

AC: Your book centers on Pencil, who loves thrills and is super optimistic. And then there’s Eraser, who is a big grump and a curmudgeon. Can you talk about the development of these characters?

JA: I usually start out with a drawing. That’s how I get most of my ideas. I think of the character first, and then I build the world around them. Obviously their world is school, for the most part. I see what I feel they’re like when I draw them.

AC: I love the humor in this book. Your characters are an entertaining pair, and you have these joke breaks in between a few of the chapters, which are punny. As the author and illustrator, what role did you want humor to play in this book – and in the overall series?

JA: I wanted it to be the main component. I love funny. I want most of my books to be funny and humorous. And I’m obsessed with puns. I don’t know if that came across but, yes, I love puns. I love doing drawings of puns, like vegetable puns and all sorts of things.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Pencil & Eraser: We Have a Dull-Emma?

JA: I hope they enjoy it. I hope it’s fun. There’s not really a huge message in it, except for sticking with your friend. I just hope they enjoy it – that they laugh and enjoy the jokes. I’ve been getting some parents tell me that their kids have been drawing Pencil and Eraser because there’s a little how-to-draw (exercise) at the end. I love seeing all their drawings.

AC: Why doesn’t Pencil have her own eraser?

JA: [Laughs] Because she needs her Eraser. If she had an eraser, then she won’t need Eraser. 

AC: [Laughs] That’s so funny.

JA: When I think of her, I think of those little lottery pencils that don’t have an eraser at the end.

AC: That is really funny, because I actually just realized she’s not like a regular school pencil, because she would have the eraser on her bottom. Well, you know what? In that case, I’m really glad she has Eraser in her life. [Laughs] I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me about your book.

JA: I really appreciate chatting with you.

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Jenny Alvarado is an author and illustrator of books for kids. She lives in Palm Bay, Florida with her family and little pup. As far as she knows, her real life pencil and eraser don’t go on adventures but she likes to imagine that they do. You can find more of her work at www.JennyAbooks.com or follow her @JennyAbooks on social.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Q&A: 'Tamales for Christmas' by Stephen Briseño and Illustrated by Sonia Sánchez

In the forthcoming picture book, Tamales For Christmas, a grandmother begins preparing long before the Christmas tree is decorated. She stands before her kitchen sink – her gray hair pulled back into a bun, her blue apron on. She’s ready to begin her labor of love.

“Her kitchen is the heartbeat of our familia, loud and cramped and perfumed with delicious smells,” writes author Stephen Briseño. “With so many children and grandchildren, she finds a way to fill the space underneath the tree: sell as many tamales as she can before Christmas.”

Based on the true story of Briseño’s late grandmother, Tamales For Christmas is a beautiful picture book that recognizes a grandmother’s boundless heart for not only her family, but those in need. With masa in one hand, corn husks in the other, Grandma works tirelessly to make tamales. The number of her delicious tamales grows from 15 dozen, to 60 dozen and beyond. As the holiday season marches on, Grandma continues making tamales – enlisting the help of others in her family to help with preparing and selling them. 

Briseño, whose debut picture book The Notebook Keeper won a Pura Belpré Author Honor Award, brings us another memorable story with tender and artfully-placed refrains that young readers will love. The illustrations from award-winning illustrator Sonia Sánchez, rendered digitally with handmade brushes and textures, add a deep warmth to Briseño’s text. Grandma’s kitchen itself is its own world, with a tiled backsplash and colorful plates – and crowded with energetic grandchildren. Readers are also brought into the visual joy that are parts of the tamale-making process.

Briseño spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind Tamales For Christmas (out on Oct. 8 from Random House Studio), the communal effort behind making tamales, and more. Tamales for Navidad, a Spanish version translated by Maria Correa, will also be released simultaneously. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on your new picture book, Tamales For Christmas. I understand it is based on a true story, of your own grandmother. Can you tell us more about her?

Stephen Briseño (SB): My grandma, Rebecca Cano, was such a force of a woman. She didn’t finish middle school and worked really hard in every regard. She had nine children, and so she knew how to make a meal and stretch a dollar. She was always looking for ways to bless people. She was just a kind-hearted soul.

What stands out to me the most is she was a gifted storyteller. She would just have people leaning in around the kitchen table at all of our family events. Everyone would just be enraptured by her story, whether it was something serious, or chisme. She would have us rolling in laughter. I also remember her laugh. It was just this loud, full-bellied, unbridled laugh that you could hear down the street. She was just an amazing woman.

AC: You dedicated the book to her. What was it like to work on this book with your grandma in mind?

SB: She passed away years ago. Everyone still talks about her as if she was still here – like she’s never really gone. When the idea first came up [for Tamales for Christmas], it was going to be about a kid learning to make tamales from his grandma. A very generic story, but honoring that tradition in my family. I included her in the author’s note, and my agent sent it to my editor. And my editor was like, ‘This is a good story. It’s fine, but I want this story about your grandma making 1,000 tamales.’

It was wonderful, because I called my mom, several of my aunts and uncles, and was like, ‘Tell me about her… What was it like from your perspective? What do you miss about her?’... I got to hear stories that I hadn’t heard before about my grandma, that made her an even fuller person in my mind. It was a unique, fulfilling process to write this story.

AC: In your book, the main character’s grandma is a true hustler – making tamales so that she would be able to get her family gifts. The number of tamales she makes throughout the story grows and grows. It’s truly remarkable. It made me think about how much one person’s hands and hard work can produce, and the joy one person can spread. Is that something you thought of as you were piecing together this story?

SB: Yes. I remember this year that she made them, because I was a part of the process. I think I was 12 or 13, and I remember thinking even at that time, Man, this is a lot. I would see the number of tamales in her freezer just grow and grow and grow. And then every now and then the freezer would be cleared out, and then refilled back up again. Because people would buy them, and then she’d make more. 

As I was writing it, part of the craziness of this story is just the sheer number [of tamales]. And so I thought that the device of seeing that number grow and grow, and having that refrain of it, is just fun.

“It was wonderful, because I called my mom, several of my aunts and uncles, and was like, ‘Tell me about her… What was it like from your perspective? What do you miss about her?’... I got to hear stories that I hadn’t heard before about my grandma, that made her an even fuller person in my mind. It was a unique, fulfilling process to write this story.”

AC: Something I loved about this story is that Grandma’s labor of making tamales is really a family endeavor. The main character watches as Dad loads up the cooler with tamales and sells them to coworkers and friends. At Halloween, Grandpa helps give out candy while she works on the tamales. And when winter arrives, the other women in the family help by seasoning the meat, melting the lard, and more. Why was it important for you to place the hands of others into this story, on the page?

SB: That’s who my grandmother was. It was never like, I’m going to take this burden on, on my own. She was so welcoming and warm, and her house was always open. Her kitchen was always open. She was a member of a community, and because of that, she was open-handed. 

I remember so vividly seeing people make tamales with her, whether they were her own sisters or my mom and tías. It was this community effort. I feel like in Mexican American society, at least, and others in Latinx society, it’s not about the individual. It’s about the family. It’s about the community that you’re surrounded by. That’s what makes life so exciting and so rich. That’s who she was, and so I really wanted to highlight that process. 

My dad was a postal worker, and so he would get up early. I remember being in the car with him, sleepy-eyed and barely awake, before he dropped me off at school. He’d pull up to my grandma’s house and fill up his cooler [with tamales], just like in the book. She would have steamed them, so they would still be hot. I remember opening the cooler and watching all the steam pour out. He would go to his co-workers and set up in the front, and they’d all come by him. And then he’d take me to school. Yes, it was my grandma’s work, but she involved so many of us in it. It’s part of what makes the memory so rich in my mind.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Tamales for Christmas?

SB: A part of it is kind of a selfish reason. I want readers to know about my grandma. On paper, she was a mom, a grandma… She was so much more than that. She was such a powerful, wonderful, amazing woman. And the fact that readers will get to know her, and she’ll get to live on beyond my family, is such a thrill for me. 

I also hope readers see and think about: Who in my family or in my life is doing this type of work? Whether it’s food making or not. And how can I be a part of it? Can I find someone like Grandma Cano, who can show me the ropes and show me the ways to be a positive force in the community?

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Stephen Briseño is the author of The Notebook Keeper, which received the Pura Belpre Author Honor Award. He has taught middle school English for 15 years, and writes, reads, and drinks a ton of coffee with his wife and daughter in San Antonio, TX.

Sonia Sánchez paints with both traditional and digital brushes using layers of texture in her work to evoke emotion and movement. Her debut picture book, Here I Am, received two starred reviews and was nominated for the Eisner Award in the category of Best Painter interior art. She is also the illustrator of Evelyn Del Rey is Moving Away by Meg Medina, the 2020 Jumpstart Read for the Record Selection. Sonia’s art has been selected for the prestigious Society of Illustrators Original Art Show three times. She lives with her husband, son, and a sleepyhead cat in a blue house near the Mediterranean Sea.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Q&A: 'The Beautiful Game' by Yamile Saied Méndez

Yamile Saied Méndez thrusts readers into action from the very start of her forthcoming middle grade novel, The Beautiful Game. Valeria “Magic” Salomón – star player of the Overlords – is playing in a State Cup game. 

And the 13-year-old is determined to win. So Valeria decides to sidestep a play her coach (and Argentine grandfather) planned and try things her way. “I stomped my foot, pulverizing Coach’s order under the spikes of my pink cleats.”

One of Valeria’s teammates whispers, “You got it, Magic.” 

She nods. The same teammate moves out of the way at the last minute for her to take the shot. And Valeria does. GOOOOALLLLL!!!!!!!

“I ran and ran and ran, fighting the impulse to take my jersey off and swing it in the air like the boys did,” she narrates. “The ref would card me if I showed my sports bra, even if it was mainly for decoration right now.”

Valeria is the only girl on her all-boys team, which isn’t really an issue until something happens to her later at the State Cup semifinal. She gets her first period, during that game. The following day, Valeria overhears her grandfather-coach and members of her team discussing moving forward without her. If she stays, the Overlords wouldn’t be able to play in a tournament. Girl players have their own tournament.

The news shakes Valeria to her core, and angers her. She soon finds herself without a team, and at increasing odds with her grandfather. Her home is also struggling with a recent death in the family. 

But with the support of her grandmother and best friend, Valeria rises up and decides to try to join a team she’s long ignored: an all-girls team known as The Amazons. Can Valeria find her place on her new team and learn to play like a girl?

For Méndez – author of the Pura Belpré Award-winning Furia – The Beautiful Game is a heartfelt novel that interweaves many themes of family, perseverance, and second chances.

Writers Mentorship Program mentee Amaris Castillo sat down with Méndez, her 2023 middle grade mentor, to discuss The Beautiful Game – out now from Algonquin Young Readers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on The Beautiful Game. I know you’re a lifelong lover of fútbol. What inspired you to write this story?

Yamile Saied Méndez (YSM): It was a very long and winded way to The Beautiful Game. When I was starting to learn how to become a writer, I took an SCBWI intensive with a very famous editor who had edited some of my favorite books. For an in-class assignment I had the image of this girl who was swinging a baseball bat. But she wasn’t a baseball player. I knew that. She was swinging the bat, and she just had this attitude. I remember sharing that piece of writing during that class, and everybody liked it very much. Nothing came of it. 

But the following summer, I was already doing my master’s and I was in the first group that went to a residency in Bath, England. It was also a generative workshop, so I had been excited that I didn’t have to plan anything beforehand. But I knew we were going to have to be writing on the spot. And I remembered this girl with a bat. 

The teachers were Martine Leavitt and Tim Wynne-Jones, who were incredible and gave us guidelines for something on the spot. And I remembered this character, and I had Valeria swinging the bat at a birthday party, to bust the piñata. Her character was just fully formed. I remember during the week of the workshop, we had to expand that scene. And Martine and Tim were telling us we had to put our character in the worst situation we could imagine. And I knew Valeria was an athlete, and so what is the worst thing that could happen to her? And then one thought went to the other, and I’m like, Oh, if she’s playing in an all-boy team, the worst thing could be for her to get her period in the middle of the game. The story just unfolded from that. The Beautiful Game was my creative thesis for my master’s. So during the semester, I worked under Jane Kurtz, who was my advisor. She was so in love with the character that it made me excited every month to submit more pages to her. And that’s how I wrote the whole first draft that year.

AC: Your main character, Valeria “Magic” Salomón, is the star of the Overlords, the top boys’ team in Utah. There’s a reason she’s called Magic. You begin the book by placing her in a boys’ team, which can bring interesting dynamics. What made you want to do that?

YSM: I’m very involved in children’s sports. All my children have played – boys and girls. Up until the teenage years, it’s not uncommon to see co-ed teams. As children get older, you see fewer and fewer girls. My son is 12 and, in his very last game last year, there was a girl on the rival team. So up until that age, you will still see a girl or two. It never is a problem until the teenage years when, if there is not a girls team available, they have to quit. That’s what happens in a lot of small schools or small towns that don’t have girls sports available. If they’re lucky, they can switch to an all-girl team. But then there are other complications, where some of the other girl teams have been playing together for a few years already, and then the newcomer has to make her place and earn her spot. That’s what happens to Valeria. So my inspiration was real life, and things that I see two or three times a week on the soccer pitch.

AC: Valeria’s abuelo is her coach. He’s raising Magic with his wife – Valeria’s abuela, Lita. Abuelo is super rough around the edges. The relationship between Magic and her grandfather can be difficult at times. What was it like depicting this kind of relationship on the page?

YSM: It was fun [Laughs]. I loved it. They are the same person. They’re both stubborn and opinionated, but they love each other so much. It’s just that they show love in different ways. 

The grandpa is an old-style coach. Many readers, or older readers, will recognize this character because that tough love from coaches wasn’t uncommon. Even during the Olympics, there was this huge talk about how the gymnastics program in the U.S. used to be super strict. Yes, they won a lot of medals, but to the detriment of the mental health of the girls. Now that the style of coaching has changed, we still have beautiful results with the cherry on top of having Olympic gold medalists who have good mental health. 

I wanted to show how her grandpa was one of the remnants of that old style of coaching, and how other generations would have taken it. But not Valeria, who is Gen Alpha. She’s not going to put up with her grandpa’s behavior, so she’s going to talk back. I saw some criticism about that, and I’m happy that it created some conversation on how young people are not going to put up with the treatment that older generations put up with.

AC: During the State Cup semifinal, Valeria gets her period for the first time. It is a big moment, literally on the field. This is not the first time you’ve written about periods. Can you talk about what it was like to set up this pivotal scene in the book? Because Valeria’s period also sets off a sequence of events.

YSM: There are some clues of what’s going to happen beforehand, and I’m hoping my readers – who will hopefully be a little more savvy – will catch the clues that everybody can get except for Valeria. Because she is in denial that she’s going to get her period. Some people in earlier reviews were like, Oh, it was a little dramatic. How could she not know? But this was very intentional. I wanted to show that Valeria was just not paying attention to her body, not paying attention to the clues. Of course the period caught her by surprise, but because she hadn’t been in touch with herself and aware of what was happening… 

I also wanted to put a little bit of emphasis on how the first period experience doesn’t have to be dramatic, or traumatic. The experience is way better when there is information, when children know what a period is all about. Because when we have knowledge, we have the power. Even if we cannot stop it, we can control the situation… I wanted to show how having knowledge is a way for young people to have power over their experience. It doesn’t have to be horrible. It doesn’t have to be super terrible.

AC: In your book there’s also a theme about a kind of estrangement between a daughter and her father. Valeria’s dad is a bit absent from her life. As a reader, it was heartbreaking to read from Valeria’s perspective. What message were you hoping to send by including this in The Beautiful Game?

YSM: I wanted to show how different families can be, because Valeria is being raised by her grandparents. Her biological dad was a teenage dad and he is part of her life, but he’s still learning how to be a dad. But he lives out of state, so it’s complicated. And although Valeria has this very sometimes even toxic relationship with her grandpa, he is the present father in her life. 

I wanted to show that families are complicated, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t love. And as long as there’s love and there’s a desire by all parties to form a relationship, that’s a good start. It doesn’t mean that all has to happen at once.

“The experience is way better when there is information, when children know what a period is all about. Because when we have knowledge, we have the power. Even if we cannot stop it, we can control the situation… I wanted to show how having knowledge is a way for young people to have power over their experience.”

AC: I want to talk about Valeria joining a girls’ team. Her love of the game thrusts her into this completely new environment, where she’s one of many girls – and not the only girl. What were you intentional about in piecing together Valeria’s experience on a girls’ team? Were there aspects of being on a girls’ team that you wanted to show?

YSM: I wanted to show that camaraderie and that funniness and all the emotions that exist in a girls team. Boys are emotional. I have seen this in my own kids’ teams. But they hold their emotions together, like their tears. Girls laugh and cry when they miss a goal, and they cry when they score, and they’re happy. It’s so beautiful to see them show the full spectrum of emotions, and I wanted to show that. I wanted to give Valeria the space to be able to show her emotions. 

In the boy’s team, she’s the best player. And it’s not because she is the girl, or in detriment of being a girl; she’s just the most talented player in that team. When she goes to the girls team, she sees and admires the other girls who play as well. I wanted her to be a little bit insecure, not because of her gender, again, but because of her skills. I wanted her to learn how to play in a team – not to be the individual star. To learn that soccer is a team sport, after all. And so I wanted to show that sometimes girls are pitted against each other. They compete for everything in the world. I feel like society also pits girls and women against each other, and I wanted my character to learn that she’s stronger not when she’s competing with her peers, but when she is collaborating with them. When she is part of the team. So I hope that shows.

AC: It does. What are you hoping readers take away from The Beautiful Game?

YSM: I hope that they have space to talk about uncomfortable topics, like getting your period, growing up, and the other things that come along with growing up. It’s all (about) the social drama. It’s how we change as human beings. 

I hope that, when they close the book, they have the feeling that playing a sport is fun. That’s the main reason human beings play sports: because it’s fun. That’s why I watch them, because I have fun. They give people the opportunity to stretch themselves and achieve things that seem impossible. I think that’s something that we saw at the Olympics, how the world loves to come together to cheer for people who are achieving their dreams. 

And I also hope that they are inspired. Again, it sounds like a cliche and maybe a little cheesy, but I hope that when they close the book, they’re inspired to go and fight for their own dreams… At the end of the day, The Beautiful Game is life itself, more than the sport. And I hope that they’re just excited to live their lives.

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Yamile Saied Méndez is the author of many books for young readers and adults, including Furia, a Reese’s YA Book Club selection and the 2021 Inaugural Pura Belpré Young Adult Gold Medalist, Where Are You From?, Shaking Up the House, and the Horse Country series, among others. She was born and raised in Rosario, Argentina, but has lived most of her life in a lovely valley surrounded by mountains in Utah. She’s a graduate of Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing for Children and Young Adults program, and a founding member of Las Musas, a marketing collective of Latine writers. Connect with her at yamilesmendez.com or on Instagram @yamilesmendez.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Interview: ‘The Best That You Can Do’ by Amina Gautier

The Best That You Can Do brims with life, sorrow, joy, and nostalgia. Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, Amina Gautier’s short story collection brings readers across time to the present day with stops that include Chicago, Philadelphia, Lisbon, and the author’s own native Brooklyn. The stories are compact yet potent, exploring relationships, the connection and rights to one’s own heritage, and complexities embedded in one’s identity.

This collection, in many ways, feels like a master study on the richness of everyday lives. In “Rerun,” Black and Puerto Rican siblings are desperate for Boricua representation on their television screen. “We’ve got the Evans family – Florida, James, Michael, Thelma, and J.J. a.k.a. Kid Dy-no-mite – but we have to work to find the Boricuas,” Gautier writes. “We collect Puerto Rican actors the way other kids collect comics, valued all the more because they’re so rare.” In “Why Not?” a Black woman struggles with the low dating standards others expect her to accept, and the subsequent fallout after a date with an acquaintance. In “Housegirl,” an elderly woman grapples with loneliness in the space of time between visits from her personal home-care attendant.

Gautier spoke with Latinx in Publishing recently about the inspiration behind The Best That You Can Do (out now from Soft Skull Press), re-exploring Puerto Rican identity, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on your stunning book, The Best That You Can Do. Your collection is lyrical and bursts with many themes, including identity, Blackness, and womanhood. I felt like I was right beside your characters as their stories unfolded. You were the inaugural winner of the Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, which is how The Best That You Can Do came to be in readers’ hands. What has winning this prize meant to you?

Amina Gautier (AG): I love winning prizes, first of all [Laughs]. Who doesn’t? The Kimbilio Prize, specifically, is important to me because Kimbilio means ‘safe haven,’ and it is an organization that nurtures and promotes the work of writers from all across the Black diaspora. So it’s a very important award. 

Many of the awards for short story collections are typically attached to university presses, which tend to be small independent presses. Having this contest be attached to Soft Skull Press, which is distributed by Penguin Random House and is connected to Catapult, I think, makes the contest even more significant and more visible because it’s a larger press. It’s not one of the Big Six, but it is larger than an independent press which means that it has the power to get the work distributed widely.

But specifically as a writer of short fiction, it’s important to win contests because short fiction or short story collections tend to not be publicized or promoted as widely as novels are. So having a contest win attached to your book is an extra layer of publicity that will make people pay attention to it. All four of my short story collections have been published through contest wins. 

AC: You center complexities within the Puerto Rican diaspora in the first section of your book. In “Buen Provecho,” siblings keep their desire to learn their father’s language hidden from their mother so as not to wound her. In “Quarter Rican,” a teenage girl visiting family on the island is made to feel not fully Puerto Rican by a relative. As a writer with Puerto Rican ancestry yourself, I know you have been writing about your community for years. For this collection in particular, though, what truths were you hoping to unearth in re-exploring Boricua identity?

AG: Some of the things that I’m always interested in promoting and exploring with Boricua identity and Latino identity is 1) Constantly reminding people that Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. People seem to keep forgetting that. When I’m writing about Latinx diaspora experiences, I’m interested in pushing the boundaries and reminding readers that there are so many different ways to be Latino or Hispanic. 

Even with the narrative that is frequently pushed about languages – like, ‘OK, you know how to speak Spanish because you learned it at home, or because you learned it in school because of exposure.’ But there are plenty of other reasons why a person could decide to forgo speaking the language, or decide to be interested in it. At a certain point in your life, or development, or age, it can become a conscious choice. 

In “Buen Provecho,” we have a mother who makes a decision not to learn Spanish because she associates with her father. And we have kids who are not exposed to it in the house because the mothers isn’t exposing it to them. But then they go see their Titi on the weekends, and they can get exposure in other ways and make the choice for themselves. 

I want to remind people that that language is not only just a process of education and exposure, but has an emotional and psychological component to it as well… There’s so many different choices that people are making when they are choosing to adopt a language or adapt a language. And I want to remind readers that all of these possibilities are valid and valuable. That we are expansive.

“When I’m writing about Latinx diaspora experiences, I’m interested in pushing the boundaries and reminding readers that there are so many different ways to be Latino or Hispanic. ”

AC: In that vein, your focus on Puerto Rican identity in this collection is deeper than, “Am I Puerto Rican enough?” You cover the complexities and relationships across generations, and also how, for example, that identity impacts a partner who is not Puerto Rican. As you worked on these stories, was there anything that surprised you about the expansiveness of what it means to be Puerto Rican?  

AG: All the stories surprised me. I don’t start out with any kind of organization or plan. For instance, “Making a Way” is one of the last stories that I wrote. The collection was accepted at the beginning of January 2023 but I felt that it needed just a few more stories, so I wrote a few more to round it out. In “Making a Way,” I have this wife who is resentful of her husband. I thought I was going to explore her keeping the kids and not letting them go to PR for the summer as a way to punish him, and realizing that this specific character can have one relationship with her husband – but still want an experience for her children. 

She would like to have been able to go to Puerto Rico to see her husband’s native land, but just because she can’t she’s not going to deny her children that experience. I didn’t know that that’s what I was going to have her do. Her story is where I started really thinking about language as a form of inheritance, as a form of birthright. That despite what’s happening with her and her husband, her kids have a right to spend time with him, to go to the island, to learn Spanish if they want to. And she’s not going to deny them that experience.

AC: Your collection drips in nostalgia. I loved the many TV show references in “Rerun” and appreciated you placing the reader in the post-summer break frenzy in “Summer Says.” Much of your book is inspired by the 70s and 80s. What was it like to place that time on the page in many of these stories?

AG: It was a lot of fun to go back and think about the cartoons and different shows I was watching, but also about how the pop culture that Gen X kids were exposed to helped shape our identity. Like watching all the cartoons with morals on the end of them… I wanted to make this a love letter to Gen X. I feel like my generation is constantly forgotten. I really wanted to infuse in deep references to that pop culture. We Gen X kids were forced to be immersed in our parents’ lives and music. We had to watch the TV shows that they did, so I also think that it’s one of the last cross-generational moments before people split off and everyone went to their own separate rooms to watch their own separate TV shows. 

AC: In the section titled “The Best That You Can Do,” we see more stories about women and their disillusionment with love and with men. We see disappointed women, tired women. The men in many of these stories, fall short of their promises to their partners. In “A Recipe for Curry,” a wife is stuck in a monotonous life – having to cook curry for her husband once a week. She hasn’t been able to realize her dreams, despite her husband’s promises to her. I’d love to learn more about your depiction of hetero-relationships in these stories. What do you want readers to take away from them? 

AG: As you know, this section is the longest one in the collection. There’s a whole cycle-of-life going on with the first two sections being about youth and childhood, and then this longer section being about adulthood and adult relationships. And then the next section is about our external lives politically, and the last section is about when we come to the end of our lives. 

In this long section about romantic relationships or about adult children’s relationships with their parents, I’m really exploring social pressures and social expectations that are on us when we’re adults. What happens in our relationships based on what our friends or our partners are expecting us to do? How are we navigating the goals and dreams that we have for ourselves as adults, in conjunction with our parents or our partners’ expectations?

In “A Recipe for Curry,” the dream was just to get out of Guyana and to make it to the U.S. That’s more tangible, even though there are other promises: a house, a car, all these moments of exploration. But just getting to the U.S. kind of becomes the focus. And once they’re there, they become stuck in this rut. What part do we play in becoming engineers of our own self-destruction? Because the wife plays a part in that – in continuing to make it for him once a week and not pushing back.

AC: Some of the stories are a few pages long – some only a couple. How do you know when a story is complete? Do you step away from it once you feel you’ve answered a question – or posed one to your reader?

AG: I don’t deliberately try to pose questions. Hopefully they come out organically. I don’t like to be a heavy-handed writer. I do focus on an image, or an issue, or a problem, and then try to follow it through to its natural conclusion. With this collection, I knew that it would all be very short fiction… That meant that I would have to compress a lot of the action, and condense it. I wouldn’t always have time for a scene, so I would have to use language and lyricism to create this sort of narrative pressure to push the story through. 

I would know that I was done when I couldn’t do anything else with the language to make the point. Which is a little different from my other collections, which have more traditional-length stories with multiple scenes and more dramatic action. But for this one, the focus is really on the language and the syntax. So once I get this feeling that everything sounds right, then I know that the story is done.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from The Best That You Can Do?

AG: Besides calling it like my Gen X love letter, I’m also calling it my pandemic book because it wasn’t the collection I was supposed to finish next. I had a whole research leave and I was going to write another collection. The pandemic hit, and I couldn’t focus on writing 25-page stories when the world was in such chaos. For months I didn’t write anything because I was depressed and isolated. I told myself, OK, you can’t write your usual 10-12 hours a day or five days a week, but maybe you can write two days a week. Maybe you can’t write a 25-page story. Maybe you can write a four-page story… I used that to kind of write myself out of the depressive environment of a pandemic. I was just thinking, nobody knows exactly what to do right now. We don’t have guidance. We’re just all trying to do the best that we can do – which is why that’s the title of the collection. 

In addition to hoping that readers enjoy the pop culture moments and think about the ways in which characters help undermine their own destinies, I want this book to be inspirational. Because I’ve told myself, OK, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t complete the project that I set out to complete. It just matters that I kept writing. And this is what came out of it. I hope that when readers or aspiring writers who get stuck in a project, they can remember that, ‘Maybe this project isn’t working right now. But as long as I just keep writing, I can write something else. I can change genres for a couple of months. As long as I keep writing, there’s hope and there's promise. And what I do is valuable.’ 

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Amina Gautier, Ph.D., is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Gautier is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award,the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Fiction. For her body of work, she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Interview: ‘Daughter of the Light-Footed People’ by Belen Medina

“From deep in the copper canyons of Mexico, her swift footsteps echo. Clip clap, clip clap.”

That’s the vivid opening of Daughter of the Light-Footed People, a forthcoming nonfiction picture book about Lorena Ramírez, a runner from Mexico’s Rarámuri Indigenous people (also known as Tarahumara). The clip-clap sounds come from the athlete’s well-worn huaraches cut from rubber tires. Ramírez, now 29, is internationally known for running in sandals and in a brightly colored skirt.

Written by Belen Medina and illustrated by Natalia Rojas Castro, Daughter of the Light-Footed People takes readers on a sixty-mile run with Ramírez. We learn that her strength comes from kicking balls across miles with her siblings, and that her patience is built from walking for hours. “Over hot, cracked earth and rocks, through cold, hard rain, she runs,” Medina beautifully writes. Castro’s illustrations are equally gorgeous, infusing rich colors and textures to the page. In one spread, Ramírez’s long, dark ponytail morphs into a memory bubble of her as a child, herding goats and cattle for her family.

Out on June 11 from Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Daughter of the Light-Footed People is not just centered around this one Mexican athlete, but offers a real-life lesson that you can persevere and achieve so much even if you don’t have as many resources as others.

Ahead of the book’s release, Medina spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind her debut picture book, what sets Ramírez from other runners, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Daughter of the Light-Footed People. This book is about María Lorena Ramírez, an Indigenous long-distance runner belonging to Mexico’s Rarámuri ethnic group. What inspired you to write this story?

Belen Medina (BM): I have two kids, and during COVID I was home with them a lot. I found a Netflix documentary about her and we watched it. And I was just completely awestruck. We were all just dumbfounded by this woman who was running with just her huaraches and her Indigenous clothes. I was so profoundly moved by her grit and endurance, and her story. And so were my kids. And I just thought, Gosh, I feel every kid should know about her. Every person. And as a Mexican American, I just felt especially proud. 

I’ve written other books that haven’t come out yet, but I started to look to see if there had been any books about her. I wanted to know more, and realized that there hadn’t been. So that’s how that journey started for me. But mostly, I was just so incredibly inspired by her story and I thought: What an amazing person, and what a great example of just having so little and doing so much. I thought this is a great message for kids and for adults.

“What she was doing wasn’t just for her. It was for her family. It was for her people. She’s running as a community, which I felt was really moving and powerful. ”

AC: Your story beautifully follows María Lorena on a run and also touches on her background, such as her strength coming from herding goats and patience built from walking for hours to buy food. Can you describe your research process to be able to include these details?

BM: I basically scoured every available information I could find. I read some books about long-distance running and Tarahumara people. There wasn’t a lot, but as much as I could watch every interview she did, read every interview she did. I just did a lot of research that way. Then I synthesized the information, because in picture books you have very few words that you can use. And then the process was just whittling it down and trying to make it concise and moving for kids to be inspired by her in as few words as I could. 

As you know with editing, I have editors ask me where everything came from – and I had to go back. I have a bibliography of things, but it was fun. I really do like research. I love learning about the Tarahumara people. I didn’t know about them – from where they come from, which is this area that’s bigger than the Grand Canyon… I was blown away by so much that I didn’t know about Mexico.

AC: In your author’s note you write that María Lorena made international headlines when she won the Ultra Trail Cerro Rojo in 2017 – not just for her victory, but because she was wearing huaraches and a brightly colored skirt. There’s one part of the book where you write that she weaves to the front of the pack of runners without fancy gear or gadgets. It made me think about what distinguishes her from other runners. In telling this story, is there anything else you took away from what makes her unique in the running world?

BM: What stands out for me –  and not so much in terms of Lorena, but Lorena and her family and her people – is that they don’t just run for themselves. She’s running for her family and to make a better life for other people. I sometimes find that – and I’m generalizing – in America, in our culture, we tend to be very individualistic-minded. We do it for our own selves, or maybe for our ego or whatever we’re proving to ourselves. But we’re not running, or whatever we’re trying to do, because we’re bringing up everyone around us. And that’s what I felt like I learned from her: What she was doing wasn’t just for her. It was for her family. It was for her people. She’s running as a community, which I felt was really moving and powerful. That just gives her that extra motivation.

AC: Your prose is beautiful, and so are the illustrations by Natalia Rojas Castro. What do you think her illustrations add to your text?

BM: Oh my gosh. It brought the words to life. And it’s funny because I thought to myself, Maybe I could illustrate this [Laughs]. Because I do portrait illustration. I was laughing at myself because of the things that I tried to draw. And then I gave up pretty quickly. What she did just elevated the story – the movement, the color. I fell in love with the colors. They reminded me of the colors I think of, of Mexico: just a real richness and deepness and vibrancy to the colors, and the movement. I think she really made the book. I had really little feedback. I think she nailed it. And I’m so happy that she decided to take a chance on my words, and made it her own thing. I was so amazed by some of those spreads that incorporate and then add to my words. I was so thrilled.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Daughter of the Light-Footed People?

BM: As I alluded before, I want people to be aware of Lorena and her community. A lot of people say you can do hard things, and you can. You don’t have to have all these resources to put limitations on yourself. Kids can see that you don’t need all the stuff to be successful and that, with grit and perseverance, you can accomplish amazing things. I think that’s a great message – not to make excuses for ourselves… But seeing a woman who is from a modest background able to achieve these amazing things against people with so many more resources – now they can also accomplish whatever it is that they want to do, even if they don’t have all the things that they think they need.

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Belen Medina, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, was born and raised in California’s Central Valley. She spent her childhood summers in Mexico with her grandparents and has been navigating two cultures her entire life. Still a Californian at heart, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two sons. Daughter of the Light-Footed People is her debut picture book.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.

Author Q&A: ‘Abuelo's Flower Shop’ by Jackie Morera

In Abuelo’s Flower Shop, a young girl named Elena is holding a bunch of yellow tulips. She shouts to her grandfather that she’s almost done gathering flowers.

It’s Elena’s first day working with Abuelo in his shop. A short time later, a woman in a black dress approaches them. She looks sad and is dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Is she okay?” Elena asks after the woman leaves. Abuelo insists that she is. He tells Elena not to worry.

As the day continues, Elena meets more customers. And with each customer, she senses a heaviness she doesn’t quite understand.

Finally, Abuelo explains that they are headed to the garden across the way. It’s a sad place, but special because it’s where people visit their loved ones who have died.

Abuelo’s Flower Shop by debut author Jackie Morera is a tender and sensitive lesson on how to support those who are grieving. Morera’s gentle hand guides young readers through Elena’s journey to learning about the cemetery nearby. The illustrations by Deise Lino add an extra layer of warmth and inclusion to this story.

Morera drew from her own life to tell this fictitious tale that also celebrates intergenerational love. She recalled her grandparents selling flowers from their home in Miami. “They were street vendors, and they would sell flowers to any passerby,” she said. “They lived catty-corner from one of the bigger cemeteries down in Miami.”

Out on June 4 from Beaming Books, Abuelo’s Flower Shop is Morera’s quest to answer what it would look like if a child realizes that there’s something more to this garden across the way. This story is a softhearted lesson about grief.

Ahead of the book’s release, Morera spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind Abuelo’s Flower Shop, what she learned about grief while writing this story, and more.

Amaris Castillo (AC): What inspired you to write this story?

Jackie Morera (JM): I wanted to write picture books as a creative adventure because I was writing longer form and wanted to try something different. I was dredging up these ideas and these moments from the past to tell the story, so it’s loosely based on my own experience (of) growing up in Miami and visiting my abuelos who would sell flowers from buckets in front of their house. They were street vendors, and they would sell flowers to any passerby. They lived catty-corner from one of the bigger cemeteries down in Miami. 

The conversation between Elena and her abuelo – all of that is fiction. But the story, the place, and what could happen between a young child and their grown-up in those moments is what inspired this story of realizing when you’re young (that) there’s a reason why at least most of these people who are stopping by might be buying these flowers – and what that space across the street represents. And what that might look like when a child is inquisitive, or maybe isn’t inquisitive, and recognizes through various moments that there’s something more going on here and what the grown-up in that relationship might do. That’s what inspired this story: a little bit of real life, and then a little bit of speculation of what that conversation would play out as.

AC: In your book, Elena at first doesn't understand that the people who come to her abuelo's flower shop are grieving. How did you approach this lesson on how to support those who are grieving in order for it to be digestible to young readers?

JM: When I first wrote it, I wanted it to be a snapshot of a moment that could happen. Initially it wasn’t a book to help people understand what grief could look like. That wasn’t the motivation for putting the story together. It ends up feeling more that way, and I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful to have that story out there for children, and for caregivers who are looking to help children through those. But for me, I really wanted it to be an inquisitive child who is excited to be supporting or just being with her grandfather, and realizing a little bit more about what is happening around her. And then that led to a conversation about empathy and understanding how other people might be feeling and why.

(I also wanted it to touch on) the complicated relationship between young children and their caregivers or the grown-ups in their lives. In my experience, in the Latino community, the men are often head of household and maintain a lot of the more adult topics and the things that they try to keep children safe from understanding. So it was a little bit of all of these things. 

“Initially it wasn’t a book to help people understand what grief could look like. That wasn’t the motivation for putting the story together. It ends up feeling more that way, and I’m grateful for that.”

AC: Some adults try to protect the young people in their lives from harsh realities or sadness, which can be futile. In your book, these themes literally arrive at Abuelo's flower room. I notice, though, that Elena isn't aware at first what that garden across the road really is. Why did you choose to have Abuelo initially keep that fact from her?

JM: In my experience growing up in a Latino community, children are very protected. I think there’s a nice difference here from what I experienced growing up with a lot of the grown-ups in my life, to what I would love for children to experience with grown-ups in their life – which is more of a softness, sensitivity, and an openness to having these conversations. But that’s where it started. 

Obviously, we’re not a monolith. Not every community is this way, especially when it comes to grief. But the grown-ups and specifically the men like to protect the children as much as possible with these difficult topics, and keep them away from grief and loss and all of this. Elena is so excited to help her abuelo and be with him out there. This is a beautiful place with flowers and people, and there’s a garden across the street. She’s so little, so she doesn’t need to know these things. And I think sometimes adults wait until the very last minute to say something, to make something clear. In this instance, Elena is not experiencing grief herself. So it’s (about) recognizing the grief in other people. 

Even now, as a parent, you never know when is the right time to share something with your child. I think abuelo is doing a little bit of that: he’s trying to maintain her knowledge of what is happening until it is really in front of her – until the customers really start to approach and she’s realizing. As a grown-up he’s kind of struggling with that, from when to make that clear.

AC: While writing this book, did you learn anything new about grief?

JM: I think there’s been changes over the past couple of years in general with how open we should be or recommended to be with children, and how explicit we should be in our language. 

If I had written this story 10 years ago before having children, before working with children, before that educational awareness, maybe the language would have been a little bit softer. And now it says ‘people who died’ in the text because that’s something that is helpful for children anywhere, to have that very literal language of, this is what happens, and this is a way that you can keep the memories of that person alive. Whether that’s you as someone who has experienced loss and death, or you as someone who is helping somebody through that difficult time. That’s definitely something; how direct we have to be with our language with children. I feel like that’s a pretty big change. 

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Abuelo’s Flower Shop?

JM: I hope that readers walk away feeling more able to be curious. Because I think that’s something that I love about Elena. She’s asking these questions out loud, and that leads her to understanding what is happening. And if she didn’t ask, she might have come to her own conclusions – and maybe those wouldn’t have been the correct conclusions, or she wouldn’t have realized and had this opportunity to learn what’s going on. 

I think recognizing that it’s OK to ask questions in uncomfortable moments helps you to be a more empathetic person. There are ways that you can help people who are going through difficult moments, even in small ways (like) helping them pick a flower or helping them remember their loved one… So that curiosity and that sense of, it’s OK to ask questions. And there are people around me who can help me better understand what’s happening.

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Jackie Morera is an author of books for young readers of all ages. Born and raised in Miami, Jackie now lives in Central Florida with her husband, son, and goofy pup. She enjoys telling stories, savoring pastelitos, and cozying up for a good nap.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.

Author Interview: We Are Owed. By Ariana Brown

Writers Mentorship Program mentee Ayling Zulema Dominguez sat down with mentor Ariana Brown to discuss her poetry collection, We Are Owed. Continue reading for this insightful conversation and do not forget to grab your copy before the end of 2025!

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez (AZD): We Are Owed. is your debut poetry collection, and it is such a thorough work of confronting anti-Blackness in nationalist identities, as well as writing about Black kin in very venerative and beloved ways. How did you arrive at the core questions and investigations of We Are Owed.?

Ariana Brown (AB): I was kind of the resident Black History expert in Mexican-American Studies classes. Professors would refer to me for dates and times of certain events. And it was wild to me because I thought, “This department is in the same building as Black Studies; do y’all not talk to each other?” A lot of the questions in We Are Owed. come from that place of frustration. Of being someone who is able to recognize patterns, is unafraid to name them, and goes on to ask people, “Now that we know they exist, what are you going to do about that?” Because as someone who is racialized as Black in every space I enter, at least in this country, I don’t question who I am as a person, the world tells me—that’s what interpolation is, that’s what anti-Blackness is. So, I don’t have these questions of, “Who do I belong to?” Who I belong to is very clear to me. My question is, “How do we achieve liberation?” And I think that requires a certain precision and specificity that, if you are indoctrinated into the concepts of mestizaje and ‘we all have this indigenous past,’ I think can get really lost because you start to play around with the meanings of things, and I think that can get really dangerous. So in the collection, I really do insist on specificity. The meanings of things matter to me. Clarity matters to me.

(AZD): Was there any point in writing the book where there were obstacles to clarity, and if so, how did you approach that?

(AB): One of the experiences that I write about in We Are Owed. was a study abroad trip I did during college to Mexico City. I was the only Black person on the trip, everyone else in the group were mostly bilingual Mexican-Americans who had grown up in the border-towns along the Texas-Mexico border. Being in Mexico City really helped me figure out some of the specificity in We Are Owed., because I do think that if you are a child of immigrants or you exist in the diaspora somewhere and are not living in your ancestral homeland, there can be a tendency to essentialize and romanticize what the experience is of being someone in your homeland is, or what your identity is as a whole. Being in a space where most of my classmates were actually from South Texas, versus me being from San Antonio, I always thought San Antonio was South Texas until I heard my classmates from the valley say San Antonio is Central Texas, and I thought to myself, “Oh, they’re right. I don’t have a right to claim South Texas because living in a border-town is very different from living in a large metropolitan city in San Antonio.” It was important for me to be willing to acknowledge the differences in our experience, because in those moments, it wasn’t useful for me to say, “but we’re all Mexican.” For instance, their parents worked on the Mexico side of the border; they got paid in pesos. I had to be able to recognize, “Yes, I’m the only Black person on this trip, but I have class privilege at this moment because my mom gets paid in U.S. dollars, not in pesos.” Even being in Mexico City and just watching how all of us were racialized differently—most of my classmates would definitely be racialized as “Other” in the U.S., but in Mexico, they were called “gringas,” and they were very confused by this. To them, they were brown, and being called “gringa” felt like a rejection of who they were. But for the locals, they were just acknowledging that my classmates were not from there, and were American. So, there were all of these areas that people might think of as “gray areas,” but to me it felt very helpful to be able to see that clarity, because then I could make sense of things. A lot of the research for We Are Owed. was figuring out, “What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? Where did they come from, and what purpose do they serve?” And then trying to figure out what I want my relationship to these stories to be; do I find them helpful? Do I find them hurtful? What do I need to correct? What do I want to be clear about?

(AZD): In your poem, “At the End of the Borderlands,” you write, “would you fight for those you don’t love, to whom you are indebted?” There is such a palpable praxis of care woven into the book, and I was wondering if you could expand a bit on what it means to be indebted to whom we may not love?

(AB): There’s a book that I read while I was writing We Are Owed. called Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson, and in the book he coins the term “relational accountability.” The term is part of ethnographic research and elaborates the idea of ‘nothing about us without us.’ This idea that we don’t exist apart from each other. One of the examples I can think of right now is the genocide happening in Palestine. Right now, it’s the week of the strike that Bisan called for, so I am striking. I don’t personally know people in Palestine, but I am indebted to them. I don’t have to love you to fight alongside you. I think that’s a really key part that a lot of folks are missing. Especially when we come into this idea of social justice through what we see on social media, where everyone feels like you have to be this big happy family, and we have to honor our differences; that is important, yes, but it’s also not necessary. This is something that we learn from disability justice, that people do not have to be loved or likable in order to be worthy of living livable lives. That clarity, that specificity of “I don’t need you to like me, and I don’t need to like you, but I can recognize regardless of what my relationship is to you, you have a right to exist, to not be displaced from your homeland. Especially if the country I live in is actively funding your displacement and your genocide, I have a responsibility to do something, to not just feel something about it, but to do something about it.” Otherwise, what am I writing any of this stuff for, you know?

(AZD): We Are Owed. challenges the notion of identities being tied to nation-states, and the imperial languages that helped form these nation-states, in fact calling for adversarial relationships with nation-states. In your poem “Negrita,” you write, “I fear you offer your heart to this language ... To survive here, mija, I work on the words, making a list of everything we are owed.” What do you think a language that is worthy of offering one’s heart to looks like, if there ever is one?

(AB): The quote that almost opened We Are Owed. was by the Nigerian Writer, Chinua Achebe, which is, "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it." It didn’t quite fit, but I just love that quote and think about it all the time. I do think that in a lot of non-Black communities, there’s this feeling of needing to learn one’s heritage language, or else being completely lost to it and to one’s culture. And there's a reality to that. But I also think, as an African-American person who has been displaced from whatever my heritage language is for many generations, I think that African-Americans and Black folks in diaspora show us constantly, time and time again, how we have made language our own, how we have made culture our own. When I was a little kid, I used to spend summers with my great grandmother in Galveston, TX, and we would go to church together. Being around Black Baptist preachers, that mode of communication and fellowship is so specific—how one relates to another person in that space, how you participate in that space, how language is used. There are so many different ways to communicate that are beyond the word itself. And when I think about language that is liberatory, it’s not necessarily something a matter of, “I need to find something that is completely removed from a colonial history,” but rather, why can’t that language be tenderness? Why can’t that language be me reaching out to you and us holding each other in this knowing that we are in the muck of it, but we’re gonna hold on to each other no matter what? For me, it’s less about the specific words that one uses. I think we waste a lot of time lamenting or trying to get back what was lost. I think that energy could be better directed towards a real politic of mutuality. I think that is where our future really really lies. I think that’s where all the potential is, in our relationships with one another. That to me is decolonial. That to me is anticolonial. Sometimes it doesn’t quite matter the words you use, sometimes the actions are the most important thing.

“ A lot of the research for We Are Owed. was figuring out, “What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? Where did they come from, and what purpose do they serve?” And then trying to figure out what I want my relationship to these stories to be; do I find them helpful? Do I find them hurtful? What do I need to correct? What do I want to be clear about?”

(AZD): As an educator myself, something I’ve always appreciated about your writing is the way you’ll craft lesson plans to accompany your poems. How did you go about crafting the bibliography in We Are Owed., as well as the Teacher’s Guide that goes with the book?

(AB): I love that you ask that because it’s really important to me. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day who is also a poet, and we had this critique of the mainstream literary world, which is that a lot of people in the U.S., poets and non-poets alike, seem to have this idea that the poet is the person who is supposed to critique things. In poetry spaces, however, we have not cultivated a practice of deep study, so what ends up happening is that any poet now seems to feel very comfortable making critiques of things without having done any of the research that goes along with it. As someone who grew up in spoken word poetry spaces, I’ve seen the ramifications of that in the audience. I do think that using words is spiritual. I do think that writing is a spiritual act. I do think that standing on a stage and performing them in a rhythmic manner much like you would a ritual or a spell, it has consequences, and so it is alarming to me when folks are not interested in doing the research, but are interested in being known as people who make cultural critiques. I think it’s really, really important for us to recognize the responsibility that we have as people who work with words. You can do a lot of damage with words. You can confuse people, easily. If you say it in a convincing-enough way, you can convince people of just about anything. So, I’m very cautious and the research part matters a lot to me, because I don’t want people to just take me at face value; I want you to be able to trace my steps. That’s why there’s a selected bibliography at the end of We Are Owed., because if you have questions, I want to encourage you to seek the answers out yourself, and to be able to do so with the resources I reference. That’s my librarian and neurodivergent teacher background. A lot of poetry books don’t come with a Selected Reading list, and so it was exciting for me to think of this as both a poetry book and a classroom text. That’s why there’s the foreword by Dr. Pelaez Lopez, that’s why there’s the Selected Reading list at the end, and that’s also why I built the Teacher’s Guide, where I worked with a college professor, Joshua Deckman, who has taught We Are Owed. in his classes before. He had me do a classroom visit, and had such fantastic lesson plans developed for the book, that I thought, “What if we extended these?” We came up with poetry prompts, keywords, themes, and discussion questions; I wanted people to be well-resourced when they came to this book because I also recognize that the way that I’m talking about Blackness and Mexicanidad is very different from how most people have encountered those subjects. So, I expect there to be some confusion, but as a teacher, I also know that the confusion and disorientation is a key part of learning—that means that you’re learning something. I wanted people to be well-resourced as they move through that disorientation.

(AZD): How does this book fit into your writing journey? How do you think it will inform any future projects that you’re taking on?

(AB): I love this question. It took me six years to do all the reading, research, and writing that this book became. This feels like my Magnum Opus. This book is really important to me and I’m really proud of it. I get really emotional when I think about it. But,, I think that this book was my attempt at navigating a lot of the confusion and questions that I had around some of my very formative experiences as a person. And through writing this, I was able to find clarity, I was able to find a sense of community. In terms of where to go from here, one thing I couldn’t figure out when writing We Are Owed. was how to write about some of the complexities of family. My family is sort of present in the book, but not really. What I’m trying to figure out now is how to write ethically about the violence and abuse in my family. Because some of those stories are not mine to tell, but they have affected me and changed me. I do think that one of the deepest cruelties of witnessing abuse is that it is very uncomfortable for other people to hear you speak about it, so there is a silencing, whether it’s voluntary or not. It’s not “dinner table” conversation, and if you do bring it up, you’re only supposed to talk about it once, as though it’s not a thing that will affect you for your entire life. I have a lot of things that I’m curious about and trying to work out in my mind around this subject, that are of course all related to white supremacy and colonialism and patriarchy. I see the patterns very clearly in my mind, and I want to be able to name the thing, but I can’t be as courageous in naming the thing that I did here in We Are Owed., because some of those stories are not mine to tell. So what I’m trying to figure out now is a bit more of a turning inward. Being able to write in a way that feels clear for me and transparent in a way, while still respecting the anonymity that my family members deserve. I’m branching out into fiction, I’m working on a Young Adult novel. I’ve started writing poems again. I couldn’t write poems for a long time after We Are Owed., but I’m figuring it out again. And I’m going back to spoken word. I want to be able to write the way I speak.

We Are Owed. is going out of print at the end of 2025. If you’re reading this interview and want to re-publish the book, reach out to Ariana Brown. Buy a copy, gift it to someone. Request it at your local library so others will continue to have access.

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Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet based in Houston, TX. She is the author of We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationality and girlhood, loneliness, and care. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an M.F.A. in Poetry, and an M.S. in Library Science. Ariana is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years. Follow Ariana online @ArianaThePoet.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator with roots in Puebla, México (Nahua) and República Dominicana. Grounded in an anticolonial poetics, Ayling's writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ancestral veneration, Indigenous Futurisms, and communing with the archive are major themes in Ayling’s writing. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to birth new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? Their writing has recently been supported by Tin House, We Need Diverse Books, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Ayling is a 2024-25 Artistic Development and Teaching Assistant with The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and was previously a 2023-24 UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center Poetry & The Senses Fellow, 2023 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference MFA Presenter, 2023 Prufer Poetry Prize Finalist, and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. Select poems of theirs have been published in The Poetry Project, The Seventh Wave, The Texas Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. Ayling continues to nurture creative expression among community by hosting free monthly writing workshops online, installing interactive public artworks, and hyping up fellow poets and artists at local open mic joints. Ultimately, they believe in poetry as a tool for liberation. 

Review and Author Q&A: A Maleta Full of Treasures by Natalia Sylvester and Illustrated by Juana Medina

In A Maleta Full of Treasures, a young girl named Dulce is watching her abuela pack maletas through a screen. Her paternal grandmother is traveling from Peru soon to visit her in Miami. Dulce hasn’t seen her in three years.

Abuela wants to know: “What would you like me to bring you, mi dulce?” 

“Just you,” Dulce responds.

But Abuela promises a surprise. And soon, Dulce is reunited with her grandmother who arrives with suitcases piled high as mountains. They settle at home and begin to open the maletas. Inside them, Dulce finds all kinds of treasures and a sweet, earthy smell. Abuela tells her it’s the scent of home.

From award-winning author Natalia Sylvester and illustrator Juana Medina comes a tender story about cherished family visits and the connections we nurture with people and places dear to us. Reading it felt like a warm embrace. 

Out on April 16 from Dial Books for Young Readers, A Maleta Full of Treasures is Sylvester’s first picture book. It was inspired partly by the special visits from relatives who live in Peru and would come to the US to spend time with Sylvester and her family. “They’d bring these suitcases full of candies and letters from family members, and photographs and little trinkets – whatever small gifts they could bring,” the author recalled. “Nothing that was really, I would say, expensive. I treasured them because they were priceless.”

La Maleta De Tesoros – a Spanish version of the forthcoming children’s book – will be published simultaneously.

Sylvester recently spoke with Latinx in Publishing about what inspired her first picture book, what the maleta symbolizes to her, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on A Maleta Full of Treasures! This is your first picture book after years of writing for adults and teens. Reading it felt like a warm embrace. What inspired you to write this book?

Natalia Sylvester (NS): First of all, thank you for that. I’m so glad that it feels that way because that’s really what I had hoped it would feel. There’s two things that inspired this book. A) We had moved from Peru when I was four. And in the time between when I was four to around 12, we couldn’t go back until we sorted out (paperwork). As immigration, the system is so slow and full of many twists and turns, and ups and downs, that are different for everyone. In our case, it prevented us from going back to Peru for all those years, which was a huge portion of my childhood. And yet it never felt like Peru was absent from my sense of self and from my heart. That was really thanks to my relatives who would come visit. They’d bring these suitcases full of candies and letters from family members, and photographs and little trinkets – whatever small gifts they could bring. Nothing that was really, I would say, expensive. I treasured them because they were priceless. 

I remember my mom would ask relatives to bring Peruvian history books so that we could learn about our own history, since we weren’t learning it in US schools. And I wanted to capture that feeling and anticipation, but also the magic of having a relative visit you and all the ways that the home feels different. I remember the smells that they would bring with them. They would fill our house. It was like, that’s what Peru smells like. And I just wanted to celebrate that. 

B) It was actually very much inspired by the word ‘maleta.’ When I was writing Running, there was actually a line where one of the characters who is Peruvian-American is eating a candy and she offers it to my main character. I think she ends up saying something like, ‘I have a whole maleta-full back home.’ There was a point in the editing process when somebody asked, ‘Hey, why not just say a whole suitcase-full back home?’ And I thought, Well, no, because this is how we code switch. I don’t actually use the word ‘suitcase.’ Even if I’m speaking English, for me that word is one that’s full of emotion, and full of a specific emotion. It’s very much connected to those Latin American roots. And so I always code switch for that word. To me it’s a ‘maleta.’ And so I wanted to capture that sense of what it means that it’s not just a little literal word.

“...I wanted to capture that feeling and anticipation, but also the magic of having a relative visit you and all the ways that the home feels different. I remember the smells that they would bring with them. They would fill our house. It was like, that’s what Peru smells like. And I just wanted to celebrate that. ”

AC: I can see this story being deeply resonant to families with loved ones who still live in the countries they hail from. I myself remember the excitement of wondering what’s inside a maleta. To you, what does the maleta symbolize?

NS: To me, it symbolizes a sense of home no matter where you go… It symbolizes this connection and this sense of self that we carry with us when you’ve moved from one country to another, when you have loved ones moving between those places to visit you and vice versa, if you happen to be able to go back and visit them. It’s all the things that we carry, and the things that we hold close through that constant travel.

AC: There’s a precious moment in the book when Dulce begins to ration the sweets her abuela brought, basically savoring what’s left. She knows the visit is coming to an end. Tell us about that moment. What were you trying to show to readers?

NS: When my relatives would come over and they’d bring cookies and candies, each of us cousins had our favorites. And obviously, they can only bring so many. There’s always a concern about how much will your maleta weigh? Are you going to go over the weight limit and have to pay extra? And we would never pay extra, so of course we’re not going over the weight limit. You have a finite amount, like anything. It’s not the same as candies you would get here in the US. You can’t just go to the supermarket and get more.

To me, it seemed to also really reflect this idea of, I love that they’re visiting, but I know that they have to go back soon. So you start really trying to enjoy what’s there while it’s there. Los gozas. You try to savor them – not just the candies, but the moments that you have together.

AC: Dulce has never been to the country where her abuela is from, yet she longs for it. It made me think deeply about the ties some of us feel to certain countries and places. What do you make of that longing, and what was it like to put it on the page?

NS: I think it’s something that feels kind of innate. Like I said, I came here when I was four, so my first memories are actually here in the US. And yet the other thing that coexists alongside that is being an immigrant from a very young age, seeing how our family is not yet fitting in, is trying to adapt to this new country, the new language, the new customs, while also trying to stay connected and preserve our own cultures and traditions. Being aware of all that from a young age, I remember having this very distinct feeling of: Even though all I know is here in the US, I also know there’s so much more beyond that, that I left. And that is equally a part of me.  I missed Peru even though I didn’t remember it, because my family and parents kept it alive inside of me and through our language and the food we’d eat… I really did long for it. 

I remember the very first time we finally went back. And I say ‘first time,’ even though it wasn’t my first time there. But to me it felt like the first time going when I was 12. I was so affected by that, that I got a bag of soil from my mom’s childhood backyard. We were staying at my aunt and uncle’s house, which had been my mom’s childhood home. I went into their backyard and filled a bag with soil, and I took it home with me to the US because I wanted to take that piece of home with me. And I was 12. I didn’t know that you’re not supposed to do that. My mom found out later. She was like, ‘I can’t believe Customs didn’t stop you.’ It was so embedded in me, this idea of, Yes, the US is home and it’s where we’ve made our lives but our roots are also here. And that is equally a part of you. I didn’t feel as complete until I had those two pieces together.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from A Maleta Full of Treasures?

NS: I do hope they’ll have that warmth and tenderness you spoke about. I would love it if it helps readers feel seen in the same ways that, for example, Juana made me feel seen when I saw her illustrations. In the same way that I felt like when I was younger, reading children’s books, and didn’t necessarily see my family and my home in those books. But when I started to see the spreads of this book, I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t know that could happen. It almost felt like it healed this inner child of mine. 

I hope it’ll inspire excitement and get children and their adults to talk about the things that they treasure, and why they treasure them. It was really important to me that these aren’t necessarily treasures of monetary value. They’re treasures that can be small and simple, but are very meaningful. There’s reasons for why they connect to specific people and places that a person loves or cares for, or maybe misses. So I hope it’ll inspire people to express that and value it. 

I see stories as comfort, and I hope that that will also bring comfort even to those who might also be missing that home country. Maybe they haven’t gone yet, either. I hope this gives them a sense of hope and helps them feel connected to those loved ones, despite that distance.

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Natalia Sylvester is an award-winning author of the young adult novels Breathe and Count Back from Ten and Running and the adult novels Everyone Knows You Go Home and Chasing the Sun. Born in Lima, Peru, she grew up in Miami, Central Florida, and South Texas, and received her BFA from the University of Miami. A Maleta Full of Treasures is her first picture book.

Juana Medina is the creator of the Pura Belpré award-winning chapter book Juana & Lucas and many other titles and has illustrated numerous picture books, including ‘Twas the Night Before Pride and Smick! Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Juana Medina now lives with her family in the Washington D.C. area.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.