She said something that I think is damn near perfect: “Write specifically and furiously. I recently read a short interview with Jacqueline Woodson, when she was honored with the Lambda Literary Visionary Award.
I have worked for two years as a volunteer with We Need Diverse Books’ Walter Dean Myers Grant committee, and this year, I’ve pledged to work with ESOL students, facilitating workshops that help them build their own authorial voices and tell their own powerful stories. I also rely on sensitivity readers, and I take their feedback very seriously.Įqually important, I consider it my responsibility to support the work of #ownvoices authors by mentoring young authors from marginalized communities.
They teach me about the nuances of the culture and language, and they help me get a deeper understanding so I can build more robust and honest characters on the page (in other words, they teach me such important skills as cussing like a Salvadoran!). I rely on consultants who identify with the cultural traditions and national-origin groups I am representing. This is not a process that I take lightly, so I don’t do it alone. They have trusted me with their stories and I feel a great responsibility to convey their truth onto each page. I consider it an honor to create characters inspired by the teens I have had the great privilege to know. For twenty years, as an academic researcher, advocate, and service provider in Latinx immigrant communities in the South, I’ve listened to teen immigrants’ stories, and I’ve seen them unfold. I want so much for my books to resonate with them - Their stories inspire me to write young adult novels in the first place.īecause of how profoundly these young adults’ experiences have shaped me, every one of my books has at least one point-of-view character who is an immigrant from Mexico or Central America. My very best days as an author are these days, when eager students come rushing up to me after our workshop, asking for selfies when they tell me about their favorite character when they marvel at how I learned to cuss like a Salvadoran, or how much I know about making pupusas.
Group shots and selfies from a recent workshop with ESOL students in a Gwinnett County, Georgia High School. I worry about how they will evaluate me – the middle-aged white lady whose recent book features characters like many of them – kids who have run away from some of the most dangerous communities in the world, looking for a safe place to live and maybe – just maybe – to one day call “home”. I try to be fearless as I read to them from my own stories, but sometimes I’m not.
#Exploits of young don juan aunt marguerite full
This exercise was first introduced to me by Meg Medina, who has inspired me immensely with her practice of “literary citizenship.” One way that I strive to live into the identity of a literary citizen is by gathering with nascent speakers of English – teenagers full of ideas and energy, with incredible and often heart-wrenching stories to tell, yet struggling to put them into words that are not their first language – and, in some cases, not their second or third, either. The statements build together to create poetry – simple, beautiful, honest poetry. Each person makes a statement about who they understand themselves to be, or maybe just about how they feel at that particular moment. It’s part of an exercise developed by Alma Flor Ada and Isabel Campoy, in their fabulous resource Authors in the Classroom: A Transformative Education Process. This is how I describe myself, each time that I gather in a classroom of ESOL students to run writing workshops.
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