BOOKS


 
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AVAILABLE NOW

My Time Among the Whites: Essays

Published by Picador USA in September 2019, My Time Among the Whites is a collection of essays on feeling like an “accidental” American and the tectonic edges of identity in a society centered on whiteness. Wry, candid, and fearless, these essays capture the sometimes hopeful yet deeply flawed ways in which many Americans have learned to adapt, exist, and—in the face of all signals showing otherwise—even thrive in a country that never imagined them here.

 

 

Make your home among strangers

When Lizet—the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the first in her family to graduate from high school—secretly applies and is accepted to an ultra-elite college, her parents are furious at her decision to leave Miami. Just weeks before she's set to start school, her parents divorce and her father sells her childhood home, leaving Lizet, her mother, and Leidy—Lizet's older sister, a brand-new single mom—without a steady income and scrambling for a place to live.

 

HOW TO LEAVE HIALEAH

United in their fierce sense of place and infused with the fading echoes of a lost homeland, the stories in this striking debut collection do for Miami what Edward P. Jones does for Washington, D.C., and what James Joyce did for Dublin: they expand our ideas and our expectations of the city by exposing its tough but vulnerable underbelly.

 

SELECTED ESSAYS

 

“Thanksgiving Break in an Empty Dorm” · The New York Times, November 2017

“Miami Always Thinks the Storm Will Turn” · The New York Times, September 2017

“A 30-Something’s Guide to Real Estate” · The New York Times, August 2017

“What I Learned at Cowboy Camp” · The New York Times, June 2017

“A Unimaginable Day Arrives in Miami” · The New York Times, November 2016

“The Books My Father Won’t Read? Mine” · The New York Times, October 2016

“Who are These ‘Latino-Hispanics?’” The New York Times debate coverage, October 2016.

“The Student Who Didn’t do the Reading” · The New York Times debate coverage, October 2016

“Winning My Mom’s Vote” · The New York Times, Sunday Review, September 2016

“The Wedding Crasher of Lincoln, Nebraska” · The New York Times, July 2016

“Taking My Parents to College” · The New York Times, Sunday Review, August 2015

“Finding Your Way in a World That’s Not Your Own” · BookPage, August 2015 (Reprinted in Literary Hub “Best of the Literary Internet” series)

“People Mover: A Miami Memory” · Miami New Times, February 2015

“Edward P. Jones" · Influenced By: A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers, The Believer Magazine (Believermag.com), January/February 2015.

“On Make Your Home Among Strangers" · 18 Short Story Writers on Why They Decided to Write a Novel, Buzzfeed.com, August 14, 2014

“Facts About Neil deGrasse Tyson" · The Rumpus, July 2014

“If You Lived Here” · American Short Fiction, Spring 2014

“Leaving Hialeah: A Real-Life Epilogue” · Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education, University of Nebraska Press, 2014

“Parenting ‘Sea Oak’ Style” · American Short Fiction, December 2013