Author: Jennifer De Leon

Sometimes when writing, I hover the cursor over the I symbol in the Microsoft Word toolbox for several seconds as I grapple with whether or not to italicize a word or a phrase in Spanish. It is in such moments that I am faced with broader questions about my work that deal with audience, privilege,…

Junot Díaz once told me that he writes for his six best friends and the rest of the world.  This was a few summers ago in a VONA fiction workshop in San Francisco. We had been discussing the meaty issue of how much to explain in our short stories and novels. For example, would the…

I didn’t grow up in what I would call a literary family. We delivered newspapers; we didn’t read them. We told stories constantly, but we never wrote them down. My mom is a housekeeper. All her life she has never taken a sick day. No work meant no paycheck. Simple. Once, when visiting me at…