White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing

 

By Jennifer De Leon 

 

 

Publisher: ‎University of Massachusetts Press

Language: ‎English

Paperback: ‎232 pages

ISBN-10: ‎1625345674

ISBN-13: ‎978-1625345677

 

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way.

 

Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

 

Review

 

"The essays are engaging, funny, and thoughtful, written with an appealing ease and directness. Whether describing climbing a mountain in Guatemala, disobeying her father, or taking her first creative writing class, De Leon writes with honesty and warmth . . . Jennifer De Leon’s White Space is an entertaining, thought-provoking personal essay collection that explores race and writing with humor and wisdom."—Foreword Reviews

 

"De Leon explores her identity as a writer and a Guatemalan American in this affecting essay collection . . . This empathetic, wide-ranging look at De Leon's growth as a thinker is a journey worth checking out."—Publishers Weekly

 

“De Leon trains her gaze on the gaps in our conversations and conscious thoughts; she writes the invisible into existence, the awkward, even painful silences into language, and in that rendering, creates a new space where what was felt, but unacknowledged can be discussed.”—Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers

 

 

JENNIFER DE LEON is author of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education. De Leon has published prose in over a dozen literary journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and makes her home in the Boston area.

 

Don't Ask Me Where I'm From

Written by Jennifer De Leon

 

Publisher: ‎ Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

Language: ‎ English

Paperback: ‎ 352 pages

ISBN-10: ‎ 1534438254

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1534438255

 

“A funny, perceptive, and much-needed book telling a much-needed story.” —Celeste Ng, author of the New York Times bestseller Little Fires Everywhere

 

First-generation American LatinX Liliana Cruz does what it takes to fit in at her new nearly all-white school. But when family secrets spill out and racism at school ramps up, she must decide what she believes in and take a stand.

 

Liliana Cruz is a hitting a wall—or rather, walls.

 

There’s the wall her mom has put up ever since Liliana’s dad left—again.

 

There’s the wall that delineates Liliana’s diverse inner-city Boston neighborhood from Westburg, the wealthy—and white—suburban high school she’s just been accepted into.

 

And there’s the wall Liliana creates within herself, because to survive at Westburg, she can’t just lighten up, she has to whiten up.

 

So what if she changes her name? So what if she changes the way she talks? So what if she’s seeing her neighborhood in a different way? But then light is shed on some hard truths: It isn’t that her father doesn’t want to come home—he can’t…and her whole family is in jeopardy. And when racial tensions at school reach a fever pitch, the walls that divide feel insurmountable.

 

But a wall isn’t always a barrier. It can be a foundation for something better. And Liliana must choose: Use this foundation as a platform to speak her truth, or risk crumbling under its weight.

 

 

Jennifer De Leon is an author, editor, speaker, and creative writing professor who lives outside of Boston. She is the editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education, the 2015–2016 Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library, and a 2016–2017 City of Boston Artist-in-Residence. She is also the second recipient of the We Need Diverse Books grant. She is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From and Maya.