Writing Latinos

Today’s episode features Julián Delgado Lopera talking about his new novel,  Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You , just out from Liveright. It’s as vivid and funny as it is profound. We talk with Lopera about the depths of Colombia’s Magdalena River, the fluidity of language, and what he describes as “Travesti Lore” and the “sacred travesti gospel.” Set in Bogotá,  Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry...

Today’s guest on  Writing Latinos  is Ada Ferrer. Her last book  Cuba: An American History , won the Pulitzer Prize. Ferrer is out with a new book titled  Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter , published by Scribner. It’s an intimate, devastating, beautifully written account of her family’s migration from Cuba to the United States, and how the Cuban Revolution both broke and made her...

In this week’s episode of  Writing Latinos , we talk with Mary E. Mendoza about her new book  Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border , published by The University of North Carolina Press. Mendoza teaches history at The Pennsylvania State University. In  Deadly Divide , she blurs the boundary between humans and animals, and borderlands history and environmenta...

In this week’s episode of  Writing Latinos , we spoke with bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez about her new novel,  Last Night in Brooklyn,  a magnificent book about gentrification, attachment to place, upward social and economic mobility, and what Gonzalez describes as the “insuperiority complex” many nonwhite Americans experience in predominantly white spaces. She wrote a 21st-century Great Gat...

Our guest this week on Writing Latinos is Jaquira Díaz, discussing her new novel  This Is the Only Kingdom , published by Algonquin Books.  This Is the Only Kingdom  was named one of the best books of 2025 by The New York Times and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A professor of writing at Columbia University, Díaz is also the author of an award-winning memoir,  Ordina...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mirta Ojito, who has written two non-fiction books, has now written her first novel.  Deeper Than the Ocean  (published by Union Square & Co.) is a family drama that moves between Spain, Cuba, and the United States. In this episode of  Writing Latinos , we talk with Ojito about the meaning of “Spain” for Latinos and the desire to return. We also discuss mo...

In this latest episode of  Writing Latinos , we talk with Álvaro Enrigue about the first-ever English translation of his novel  Now I Surrender , published by Riverhead Books. Enrigue is the author of many other books, including the widely acclaimed  You Dreamed of Empires , set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Conquest.  Now I Surrender  is also set mainly in the past, during the Apache...

We’re back for season 4 of Writing Latinos! Our first guest is Jazmine Ulloa, a national political reporter for  The New York Times  who just published her first book. Titled  El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory  (from Dutton), it’s a moving portrayal of her hometown. The 2019 shooting by a self-described white supremacist at a Walmart in El Paso, whi...

Albert Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He’s one of a small number of people who founded the academic field of Chicano/Latino history. He has also mentored so many of the historians who’ve written books that teach us much of what we know about the history of Latinos in the United States. Not least, he is the author of a new book himself, titled ...

In a new episode of  Writing Latinos , we talk with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo about his most recent book,  Puerto Rico: A National History —out next month in paperback from Princeton University Press. Meléndez-Badillo offers a sweeping history of the island since Spanish colonization. Most provocatively, he chronicles a long tradition of thinking about Puerto Rico as an independent nation, even thou...

In this special episode of Writing Latinos, with the writer Justin Torres, we tried something new. Torres reads a short vignette —“Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop,” by the Afro-Puerto Rican writer, Jesús Colón—and then we discuss it together. We had so much to talk about! Historical references. Readings of imagery. His message about gender, class, and race. “Youth” in the context of Colón’s oth...

Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in an MFA program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s working on a failed history of Mexico—meaning his own failure to write his book, and the Mexican nation’s failures, especially in relation to the United States. Along the way, “Sebas” crosses many borders—between the Unite...

Marie Arana has had a fascinating career as an editor and writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novels  Cellophane  and  Lima Nights ; a   memoir called  American Chica ; a history of Latin America titled  Silver, Sword, and Stone ; and a stunning biography of Simón Bolívar, the so-called Liberator of Latin America. Arana was the editor of the  Washington Post ’s Book Wor...

You probably remember the picture of himself, both thumbs up, that Donald Trump posted on social media with the caption, “Best Taco Bowl.” It was his ode to Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo 2016. The picture mocked relentlessly, and deservedly so. For Latinos, taco bowls aren’t really a thing. And even if they were, it’s doubtful that Trump Tower would serve the best of them. For Latinos, Cinco de Ma...

For the final episode of Season 2 of Writing Latinos, we talked with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about her new novel,  Catalina, published by One World. It is an engrossing read about a young woman named Catalina, who lived in Ecuador as a small girl, migrated to New York to live with her grandparents, attended Harvard University, and, by the novel’s end, finds herself flirting with a career in wr...

In this episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with the widely published, award-winning author, Jamie Figueroa, about her new memoir,  Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico , published by Pantheon. As a child growing up in Ohio, Figueroa experienced an othering that made her feel like she needed to recover centuries of family history shaped by colonialism and diaspora. It was a journey that to...

  Sarah McNamara’s new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South is a deeply personal history of the Florida city where she grew up. In this episode of Writing Latinos , we talk about her Cuban grandmother, the family storyteller and archivist of Ybor City’s Latino community. When McNamara was a little girl, her grandma brought her to the museum where she was a docent, vowing to tell stories a...

Luis Miranda migrated from Puerto Rico in the 1970s and has maintained deep connections with the island ever since. He has worked for the mayor of New York City. He is a Latino advocate and political consultant with decades of experience. He also happens to be the father of an international celebrity. In this episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with him about his new memoir, Relentless: My Story o...

Melissa Mogollón is the author of a new novel called  Oye , out this spring from Hogarth. Meaning “listen to me,”  Oye  is Luciana’s demand to be heard. And hear her we do, in her one-sided conversation with her older sister, Mari.  Oye  is a family drama for the ages, set in the time of Hurricane Irma, which struck Florida and much of the Southeast in 2017. The family runs from the hurricane, but...

Cecilia Márquez joins us this week to talk about her new book, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation , published by The University of North Carolina Press. Above all, we discussed the production of Latino identity in relation to Blackness. Márquez argues that, in the South, Latinos are either Black or non-Black—not Black or white, mind you, but Black or non-Black. It was an import...

If you liked American Fiction, you’ll love Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim, from Doubleday. It follows the career of Javier Perez, who learns at an early age thebenefits—and devastating consequences—of writing about one’s traumas and victimization. High school teachers encourage “Javi” to write about how tough things are for him, so he could get into college. It worked. At Cornell, he wrote sto...

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a New York-based author who grew up in Boston and calls herself a “Guatelombian” writer—half Guatemalan, half Colombian. We had a lively conversation about her second novel, Candelaria —an intergenerational family drama set during the apocalypse. Lozada-Oliva’s book explores the fraught but loving relationships between three sisters, their mother, their grandmother, and the...

Writing Latinos, from Public Books , features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.   In our final episode of Season One, we talk with Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her book, The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir , published last year by Doubleday. The Man Who Could Move Cl...

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.   In this episode, Geraldo Cadava and Tasha Sandoval talk with Raquel Gutiérrez about their critically-acclaimed book, Brown Neon: Essays , published by Coffee House Press. Brown Neon won the...

Writing Latinos , from Public Books , features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors. We discuss their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.   We recently caught up with Héctor Tobar to discuss his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” . Our conversation included mention of the...