Category
Podcast
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Julián Delgado Lopera on “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You”
“I am inhabiting many different identities, sometimes multiple identities, constantly. I feel that I’m definitely building on a legacy of Latin American literature and Latino literature in the United States.”
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Place presents itself to you in fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson
“The notion of the quintessential Johannesburg book might be quite a cheeky one. There are so many Johannesburgs.”
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Jaquira Díaz on “This Is the Only Kingdom”
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…
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Mirta Ojito on “Deeper than the Ocean”
“I gave her my love for Spain, and particularly the north of Spain, and particularly the city of Santander. And I gave her my fears. I too, fear the ocean.”
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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman
“You want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space? Go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. I say it’s equally as hard.”
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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Álvaro Enrigue on “Now I Surrender”
“Books just grow like trees. You cannot control them. They become something different than what you thought it was.”
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Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions: Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann
“I come to the understanding I know nothing, and then I completely throw myself into the research.”
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Jazmine Ulloa on “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory”
“We tend to see El Paso as this very narrow space that divides Mexico and the United States, but it’s this much richer region where ideas and goods and people are constantly flowing back and forth.”
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Albert Camarillo on “Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality”
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…
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We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí…
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Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on “Puerto Rico: A National History”
“Part of what the book is trying to do is to challenge this notion of Puerto Rican docility.”
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Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde
“The desire for that sort of purist kind of connection that one might call communion, is something that I’m interested in in all of my work.”
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Justin Torres Reads “Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop”
In this special episode of Writing Latinos, with the writer Justin Torres, we tried something new. Torres reads a short vignette on air—“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…
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“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary
“I always feel that when I write, it’s like weaving senses.”
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Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set…
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Nicolás Medina Mora on “América del Norte”
“One of the main differences between Mexico and the United States is that in Mexico history is very much alive.”
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
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Marie Arana on “LatinoLand”
“The United States is not idea. We are human beings and nobody represents that more in my book than latinos.”
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde
In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
