News and Updates!

I was fourteen or fifteen when I first read Julia Alvarez’s How Tia Lola Came To Visit Stay. Though I didn’t have the words to explain it to myself even then, I was left feeling vaguely uneasy and offended by her portrayal of the titular character. Rereading it almost fifteen years later, I find I feel…

December is here! And with it a new short story set in Ciudad Real: Miss Dominguez’s Christmas Kiss When Lourdes Dominguez moved into Mrs. Gomez’s boarding house, she was assured by the landlady that sharing a room with Marisol Pascual would suit them both–and it did. It’s got girls kissing! Pastelitos! Nativity scenes! Aguinaldos! And…

In 1981, November 25th was designated as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The date was chosen to commemorate the death of three dominican women who fought against the bloody dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo: the Mirabal sisters. Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa Mirabal were three of four sisters in a well-off family living in…

One of the things I like the most about setting my stories in a fictional island is the freedom it allows me to worldbuild. I can make some things up, but I can also draw inspiration from the rich Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican traditions I’ve grown up with. In the Dominican Republic, for instance, (and…

I’ve spent most of this last, um, year (And when I say year I mean eighteen months or so. A fast writer I am not.) working on the second Arroyo Blanco novel, A Time for Desire. In it, Roberto Sandoval and Rosa Castillo, who you might remember as one of the suffragettes from A Summer…

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been struggling to free up some space in my bursting e-mail inbox. (Who’d have guessed you can’t save nine years worth of emails in the inbox of a free email provider without eventually running out of GB’s?) Maybe it’s the historian in me, but I’m ridiculously sentimental about saving…

My baby cousin—who’s almost eighteen but whatever, she’s still my baby—wrote a romance! It’s a sweet contemporary YA and I’m so delighted and proud I could burst. She emailed me her manuscript a couple of days ago and as I began to read it, I saw that she’s going through the very same thing I…

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be contributing the occasional post to one of my favorite blogs, Edwardian Promenade. My first post is on U.S. interventionism in Latin America and the Caribbean– you can find it here. More and, uh, lighter posts will follow, so stay tuned!