En Pocas Palabras. Javier J. Jaspe

Washington D.C.

“The 2023 National Book Festival was held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Several programs were livestreamed, and video of all talks can be viewed online shortly after the Festival’s conclusion. Mark your calendars now for next year’s National Book Festival, scheduled for Aug. 24, 2024.”

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/

Una lista completa de los autores que participaron en el Festival Nacional del Libro de 2023 (FNL2023) puede verse EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/

La serie que continuamos hoy se refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2023. Su objeto no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores, para lo cual nos servirá de guía el propio Website del FNL2023 en inglés: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/

Los textos de Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso, con indicación de su fuente. Esta séptima entrega se refiere a la autora Elizabeth Acevedo. Veamos:

Elizabeth Acevedo

National Poetry Slam champion Elizabeth Acevedo is the bestselling author of the award-winning novels-in-verse “The Poet X” and “Clap When You Land.” She is also the author of the critically-acclaimed novel “With the Fire on High.” Acevedo holds a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Cantomundo, and participated in the Callaloo Writers Workshop. Acevedo lives in the District of Columbia with her family. Her newest book for adults, “Family Lore: A Novel,” will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/item/no2011081225/elizabeth-acevedo/

Conferencia/Entrevista en el FNL 2023

2023 National Book Festival: Elizabeth Acevedo's Family Lore

Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-10973/

Website de la autora:

http://www.acevedowrites.com/

Biografía en el Website de la autora:

Meet Elizabeth

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO is the Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist.

She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her love.

Young People’s Poet Award

EN: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/press/158595/poetry-foundation-makes-history-honoring-2022-pegasus-awardees

…..Elizabeth Acevedo Named New Young People’s Poet Laureate
Elizabeth Acevedo, the bestselling author of The Poet X, will serve as the 2022–2024 Young People’s Poet Laureate. The laureateship and $25,000 prize are awarded to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The aim of the Laureate is to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians throughout their two-year tenure.

Acevedo's second book, With the Fire on High, was named a “best book of the year” by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. Other honors include a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and a National Poetry Slam championship. She will advise the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature.

Recent Young People’s Poet Laureates include Naomi Shihab Nye (whose tenure was extended due to interruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic), Margarita Engle, and Jacqueline Woodson…..

Ver también: http://www.acevedowrites.com/2022/09/elizabeth-acevedo-announced-as-young-peoples-poet-laureate, by Kassie Griffitts

Libros en el Website de la autora:

http://www.acevedowrites.com/family-lore

http://www.acevedowrites.com/the-poet-x

http://www.acevedowrites.com/with-the-fire-on-high

http://www.acevedowrites.com/clap-when-you-land

http://www.acevedowrites.com/beastgirl

http://www.acevedowrites.com/write-yourself-a-lantern

http://www.acevedowrites.com/inheritance

Reportajes/Entrevistas

In 'Family Lore,' award-winning YA author Elizabeth Acevedo turns to adult readers

Isabela Gómez Sarmiento

EN: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/29/1190748767/in-family-lore-award-winning-ya-author-elizabeth-acevedo-turns-to-adult-readers

Flor Marte knows someone will die. She knows when and how, because it came to her in a dream. That's her gift – all the women in the Marte family have one.

But Flor refuses to share who the dream is about. Instead, she insists on throwing herself a living wake, a reason for the entire family to come together and celebrate their lives. That's the starting point for Elizabeth Acevedo's debut novel for adults, Family Lore.

Acevedo grew up in Harlem, with summer visits to the Dominican Republic, and aspirations of becoming a rapper – until a literature teacher invited her to join an after-school poetry club….

Image…

She attended reluctantly; but what she found in spoken word performance broke her world and the possibilities of language wide open.

"I think for folks who maybe have felt it difficult to occupy their bodies and take up space and demand attention, to have three minutes where that is the requirement is really powerful," she says….

Image….

Acevedo went on to become a National Poetry Slam champion and earn degrees in performing arts and creative writing. After college, she taught language arts in Prince George's County, Maryland. Teaching, she says, is its own kind of performance – one where the audience doesn't always want to be there. But her students were struggling in other ways.

"So many of my young people weren't at grade level, but they'd also not encountered literature that they felt reflected them," she says. "Trying to meet some of those students where they were was really a kickoff for my writing."

So Acevedo began writing young adult books. The Poet X, her first novel about a Dominican-American teen finding her voice through poetry, won a National Book Award in 2018.

Pivoting to a new audience

Now, with Family Lore, Acevedo turns her attention to adult readers.

"I think the way this pushes forward her work and the growing body of Dominican-American literature is how deeply she writes into the interiors of her women characters," says author Naima Coster, who read an early draft of the novel….

Image…

The story is told through memories, out of order, sometimes a memory within a different memory. Acevedo jumps from the Dominican countryside to Santo Domingo to New York, as sisters Matilde, Flor, Pastora and Camila – along with younger generation Ona and Yadi – reflect on their childhoods and teenage romances and the secrets that bind them all together. Though the Marte women grow older together, their relationships do not get easier.

"What does it mean if these women have really just had a different experience of their mother?" says Acevedo. "And how that different experience of their mother automatically will create a schism, because now it's like, 'You don't remember her the way I remember her, and because of that, I can't trust you."….

Image….

There are infidelities, miscarriages, childhood love affairs and therapeutic dance classes. Acevedo explains that she needed to tell this story in a non-linear format, in the way memories surface and warp; the way family gossip is passed on from person to person, in a roundabout way.

Returning to the body

That format, she says, was more suited for adult readers; and writing for adults also allowed her to be candid about bodies: how they move, change, excite, disappoint.

"The generation I was raised by felt like their relationship to their body was very othered," Acevedo says. "When I speak to my cousins, when I think about myself, it's been a return to desire, a return to the gut, a return to health in a way that isn't necessarily about size but is about: who am I in this vessel and how do I love it?"

That tension is felt especially by the younger Marte women, whose supernatural gifts radiate from within. Ona has a self-described "alpha vagina," Yadi has a special taste for sour limes.

Naima Coster says it's easy to feel pressure to write about marginalized communities as clean-cut, exemplary characters. But Family Lore relishes in airing out the Marte family's dirty laundry– in showing Afro-Dominican women as full, complicated protagonists….

Image….

"It feels major, the way she writes about the ways that these women misunderstand each other, but still love each other," she says.

Acevedo says those themes – family, home, Blackness, power – will be in every book she writes, "because those are the questions that haunt me."

Family Lore reads like the feeling of getting older and no longer having moms and aunts lower their voices when you enter the room – like finally being privy to what makes a family flawed and perfect.

AUTHOR Q&A WITH ELIZABETH ACEVEDO

EN: https://www.cbcdiversity.com/post/173232285188/author-qa-with-elizabeth-acevedo/

Tell us about your most recent book and how you came to write/illustrate it.

My debut novel, The Poet X, came out a month ago! I began writing the book when I was an 8^th grade English Language Arts teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The novel was a direct response to working in a school that was 77% Latinx and 20 % Black, but it seemed for that age range there were not enough texts that culturally represented my young people. I was inspired to write a coming-of-age story from a very specific lens: an Afro-Latina growing up in New York City discovering her voice through poetry. I wanted a book about a girl learning to take up space.

Do you think of yourself as a diverse author/illustrator?

Both my parents are from the Dominican Republic and I was raised to be very proud of my cultural heritage. I cannot extricate my identity as a woman of Afro-Dominican descent from any of the work I create.

Who is your favorite character of all time in children’s or young adult literature?

Ooph! This is a tough question. I’m going to skirt it a bit and answer in regards to my favorite characters in recent children’s /YA literature: Jane McKeene from Dread Nation by Justina Ireland because Jane is snarky, and smart, and sensitive, and I just want to shield her and fight for her at all turns. Piddy Sanchez from Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina because I bawled like a baby reading her story and just wanted to hug up on her and be her friend.

Bonus answer: To answer the original question, I’ve always had a soft spot for Esperanza Cordero from The House On Mango Street. I looked at that character and I saw myself: a brown girl from the hood who wants to be a writer. And I saw that a girl like me could win…..

What was a challenge about writing a novel-in-verse?

Seeing the holes in a plot are difficult when you are navigating the narrative through 300+ poems. There were times I didn’t feel like I could hold all of the storylines in my head, especially since the story is largely told through the main character’s interiority. I couldn’t tell if enough was happening. This balancing act of action and response took some time for me to figure out, but I think I was able to find a nice rhythm.

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you are forced to sell all of the books you own except for one. Which do you keep?

When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz. This is a slim book of poems, 70 pages, but the first time I finished this book I felt like I’d been holding my breath for years and could finally breathe. I am always finding new ways to read the poems and I would want to carry Diaz’s language with me if I couldn’t carry much else.

What does diversity mean to you as you think about your own books? What is your thought process in including or excluding characters of diverse backgrounds?

As of right now, I’m trying to write my experiences, the experiences of my people, the experiences of my students, the experiences of my cities and islands into American literature. That means I plan to write a lot of black and brown and immigrant and queer characters grappling with finding joy.

Caught Between Worlds? For Elizabeth Acevedo, It’s a Familiar Feeling

“Clap When You Land,” the latest novel from the National Book Award winner, delves into the split lives that many immigrants experience.

By Concepción de León

EN: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/books/elizabeth-acevedo-clap-when-you-land-poet-x.html

Two months after 9/11, an American Airlines flight bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in Queens, N.Y. It was largely overshadowed by the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, but it shook New York City’s close-knit Dominican community. All 260 people on board were killed, most of them Dominican, and everyone seemed to know someone who was grieving.

Stories about those who were lost began to emerge, and the writer Elizabeth Acevedo became intrigued by the secrets brought to light. “We never think about how the indignity of these deaths then bring up a lot of larger questions about family,” she said in an interview from Washington, where she lives.

Her new novel, “Clap When You Land,” was inspired by that tragedy. It follows two 16-year-old sisters, Yahaira in New York and Camino in the Dominican Republic, who don’t know of each other’s existence until after their father dies in a plane crash.

Because the book draws from the trauma experienced by her community, Acevedo was crushed that the coronavirus pandemic has prevented her from meeting readers in person. “It’s the kind of book that I was looking forward to having conversations about — really being able to see the community that I was writing for in the audience,” she said. “We know what it meant to hold one another. We know what it means to come from families that have these secrets that we don’t talk about.”….

Image…..

Culture and connection are crucial to Acevedo, a National Book Award winner and the first writer of color to win the Carnegie Medal, and she uses her upbringing and background in rap and poetry in her work. Her best-selling 2018 debut, “The Poet X,” was a novel in verse that follows 15-year-old Xiomara as she explores her sexuality and finds her voice through spoken word poetry. Then came her 2019 novel, “With the Fire on High,” about a teenage mother who dreams of becoming a chef….

Image….

In “Clap When You Land,” Acevedo returns to her poetic roots, alternating between the two sisters’ voices. Camino lives a humble life with her aunt in Puerto Plata, and she fears that her father’s death dashed any hopes she had for becoming a doctor and escaping her circumstances. Meanwhile, Yahaira is left to face old resentments toward her dead father and an altered family dynamic in New York City. A settlement payment from the airline highlights the inequities between the sisters’ lives, and their two voices invoke a common feeling among immigrants: that of belonging not to one place, but two.

They reflect on this in one passage as they try to reconcile their father’s fractured life. “It’s like he bridged himself/ across the Atlantic,” one says. “Never fully here nor there./ One toe in each country,” the other responds. “Ni aquí ni allá.” Neither here nor there.

The book’s title nods to a tradition Acevedo, who as born in New York City to Dominican parents and visited the island nearly every summer, observed on her trips back. As soon as the plane touched the ground in Santo Domingo, the passengers would break into applause.

Elizabeth Acevedo, la ganadora de Medalla Carnegie, empezó a amar la literatura con fábulas criollas

Carolina Pichardo

EN: https://listindiario.com/ventana/2019/07/01/572113/elizabeth-acevedo-la-ganadora-de-medalla-carnegie-empezo-a-amar-la-literatura-con-fabulas-criollas.html

Elizabeth Acevedo nació en Nueva York, pero tiene claro que sus raíces son dominicanas. Tanto así que no creció con los típicos cuentos de hadas como una niña normal en Estados Unidos. Su infancia estuvo más inclinada a aquellas historias de la cultura dominicana que les narraba su madre….

Imagen….

Leyendas como la Ciguapa, o anécdotas del campo de su progenitora siempre la acompañaron en sus primeros años en los que fue heredando la sabiduría de su mamá al contar relatos….

Imagen….

“Yo me críe con los cuentos de mi mamá. Cuando me preguntan cuáles fueron mis inicios digo que no me crié con mucho Disney ni cuentos de hadas. Mi mamá era campesina y mi abuelo tenía yeguas, plátanos; tenían un lugar donde crecía un poco de comida, era suficiente para lo que ellos necesitaban… Yo nunca me sentí que no tenía conexión, a mí me daban lo que yo necesitaba para saber cómo soy y de dónde yo soy”, comentó la escritora “bestseller”…..

Imagen….

Ahora no sale del asombro después de haber ganado la Medalla Carnegie por su primera novela “The Poet X”, el mérito más importante de la literatura infantil en Reino Unido.

Con este no solo marcó su historia personal, también venció estereotipos.

Su nombre estará plasmado como el de la primera persona de tez no blanca en ser galardonada en los 83 años de creación de la distinción…..

Imagen….

Elizabeth confía en que romper con esta barrera le abrirá puertas y creará espacios a una comunidad de narradores que escriben sobre temas que en ocasiones no encajan en la literatura tradicional.

“No sabía que iba a estar haciendo historia y he solidificado que hemos llegado a una nueva era para quienes tienen permitido un asiento en la mesa cuando hablamos de los cánones en la literatura en el mundo”, comentó la también campeona en “Slam Poetry” de Estados Unidos.

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

They say don’t meet your heroes, but that’s only true if your hero isn’t Julia Alvarez. I can’t say enough about what this woman’s books have meant to me, and then meeting her in person I realized, “Oh, you’re just literally a wonderful human and your writing is an extension of that.” What a milestone. Axé to the ancestors for this one. ??

Una publicación compartida de Elizabeth Acevedo (@acevedowrites) el 9 Abr, 2019 a las 10:19 PDT

Explica que con el premio se dará a conocer la cultura dominicana y los aspectos positivos del país, a propósito de las informaciones que se han dado recientemente sobre este territorio caribeño…..

Imagen….

Al poco tiempo de darse a conocer la noticia muchos fueron los elogios a través de sus redes sociales, incluyendo uno del miembro de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos, el dominicano Adriano Espaillat; y del beisbolista de los Mets de Nueva York, Robinson Canó…..

Imagen….

LA DOMINICANA TAMBIÉN ES CAMPEONA DE SLAM POETRY EN EE.UU. CORTESÍA/ ENTREVISTADA

A pesar de los méritos, Elizabeth no es de las que trabaja para ser homenajeada.

Ella escribe para contar historias de los héroes que conoció durante su vida. “El barbero donde iba mi papá, la viejita de la esquina, la chica poeta... esos fueron los héroes que conocí mientras crecí y esos van a ser los protagonistas de mis historias”.

“Hay muchos premios que he recibido que ni siquiera sabía que existían ni que estaba nominada, eso me ayuda a enfocarme en hacer una historia honesta, clara y precisa. No creo que haya algún premio que podría ganar que me haga decir ‘lo hice’, eso no existe para mí”, agregó.

ORÍGENES

El padre de Elizabeth es de Cristo Rey, en Santo Domingo, y su madre nació en Cotuí, provincia Sánchez Ramírez, pero se crio en Bonao, provincia Monseñor Nouel. Desde los seis meses de nacida ya visitaba el país y cada verano a partir de los ocho años venía a quedarse en casa de familiares.

Su familia está orgullosa por lo que ha logrado. Están felices por dar a conocer la comunidad dominicana como una positiva.

FRASES

“Los adolescentes y adultos me han buscado para agradecerme por escribir la historia y por abrirles puertas”.

“Nada ha cambiado, sigo viviendo en la misma casa junto a mi esposo”.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO

AUTORA DOMINICANA

NOVELA

Pronto saldrá en español

La historia de Xiomara se convirtió en 2018 en una de las más vendidas, de acuerdo al periódico The New York Times. Elizabeth Acevedo comentó que aún no ha sido traducida al español, porque quiere que sea igual de fiel que la versión anglosajona. “Va a ser difícil porque estamos tratando de cubrir mucho territorio tanto de España como de Latinoamérica, porque no todo puede ser solamente en una lengua que la vayan a entender los dominicanos”.

JULIA ÁLVAREZ

El 9 de abril de este año Acevedo tuvo un conversatorio con la también escritora de origen dominicano

Julia Álvarez.

Elizabeth describe a la autora de “El tiempo de las mariposas” como una mujer generosa, agradecida y humilde.

“Hablar y compartir con alguien que considero un ícono y una leyenda, es un privilegio. Ella fue la primera persona que leí que hablaba sobre la República Dominicana, y también recuerdo cuando tenía 16 años y compré una copia de ‘En el nombre de Salomé’ junto a mi madre. Es el único libro que hemos leído juntas, porque fue traducido tanto en español como en inglés”, dijo.

Considera que Julia Álvarez, quien también ha sido galardonada por sus obras, la hizo acercarse a la cultura dominicana y sus raíces.

“Dicen que no conozcas a tu héroes porque te pueden decepcionar, pero ella es increíble”, finalizó…..

Imagen

Otros Reportajes/Entrevistas