Concepción De León

“They’ve been hearing that all day, all year,” he said. Instead he talks about ramen noodles, Jordan 11s, the rapper DaBaby, “whatever it takes to get them engaged.”

Earlier this month, when Reynolds’ “Long Way Down” was selected as Baltimore’s “One Book Baltimore” pick, he came to the city to field questions about the book and sign copies for hundreds of middle school students. They listened to him as he compared hip-hop to poetry — “There’s a direct connection between Tupac and Langston Hughes” — and said that early rappers should’ve been considered “teenage geniuses.”

These events — he’s done about 50 this year — are a driving part of his work as a writer: to make black children and teenagers feel seen in real life as well as on the page. “I can talk directly to them in a way that I know they’re going to relate to because I am them,” Reynolds said, “and I still feel like them.”

If his book sales and literary accolades are any indication, his approach is working. Reynolds, 35, is a finalist for the National Book Award in young people’s literature for “Look Both Ways,” which came out this month. (It is his second time as a finalist, having made the list in 2016 for his book “Ghost.”) “Look Both Ways” is his 13th book, with a 14th, an adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning,” scheduled for release next year. His 2017 book “Long Way Down” was named a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association, as well as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, the organization’s award for young adult literature. His books have sold more than 2.5 million copies.

“Look Both Ways” unfolds across 10 city blocks, delving into the lives of middle schoolers on their way home from school in the afternoons. It is a time when they are unsupervised, Reynolds said, and they “get to learn about the world on their own, for better or for worse.”

Writing for black children first and foremost, Reynolds attempts to portray the scope of their lives — sometimes including guns and violence but also happiness and laughter. “There’s always a joke somewhere,” he said. “You don’t go through what black and brown people have been through in this country and survive without understanding how to tap into joy.”

And he often portrays boys crying or feeling uncertainty or fear, because, he said, “I need boys to know that it’s OK.”

Reynolds, who grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington, credits his success to “sheer hustling.” It didn’t happen right away. He described his first attempts at getting published as straight out of a rapper’s playbook: cut a demo, then “run into a record company or you find Russell Simmons’ limousine and you throw it in the car.” For him, the demo was a book he and his college roommate had self-published. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 2005, they moved to New York and tried to slip it to security guards at publishing houses, hoping it would wind up in an editor’s hands.

The method didn’t work. Reynolds settled into a career in retail, and tried three times to get into MFA programs but was rejected. One day, his friend Christopher Myers visited him at the Rag &amp; Bone store he was managing and encouraged him to start writing again. When Reynolds hesitated, Myers recommended he read a book by his father, children’s book author Walter Dean Myers, for inspiration.

Reynolds, who was not a reader growing up, in 2011 picked up “The Young Landlords,” about six teenagers tricked into taking on a rundown Harlem building. “It chemically changed me,” Reynolds said, because it gave him permission to draw from the stories of his friends and family and write the way they speak.

Soon after, he opened a notebook and started writing what would become his first solo book, “When I Was the Greatest,” published in 2014, about three black teenage boys growing up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

Reynolds released his next books in rapid succession: “The Boy in the Black Suit” (2015), about grief and loss; “All American Boys” (2015), written with Brendan Kiely, about two teenagers of different races reckoning with police brutality; “As Brave as You” (2016), based on his brother and blind grandfather; “Ghost,” (2016), based on the life of his friend Matthew Carter. Each book did better than the last, buoyed in part by a market for children’s literature that was increasingly vocal about its lack of diversity.

“The publishing world has caught up with him," said Christopher Myers, who started Make Me a World, a diversity-focused imprint at Penguin Random House. “They are catching up with the idea that there are new voices to be heard.”

At the same time, Reynolds was doing dozens of events per year, at schools, conferences and prisons, finding that the interactions with the young people reading his books was energizing for him. “It was like, ‘Oh, so I get to rock with the kids? I get to rock with the teenagers? I get to have these conversations with them?’” he said. “I was like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’”

Asked why she feels young people are drawn to Reynolds, writer Jacqueline Woodson said: “Have you seen him?”

“Kids have not been exposed to a writer who looks like he does, who sounds like he does, who has that deep honesty and connection with them like he does,” she said. “He really sees these kids.”

Sidney Thomas, a teacher who attended the event in Baltimore, said her students responded to “Long Way Down,” a novel in verse about a boy contemplating revenge after his brother is fatally shot, because many have experienced similar losses. “I think they have a connection to it, and I think it feels very real,” she said.

One such student, an eighth-grader who lost her sister and other relatives to gun violence, said the book “brings back memories about losing my family, but it helps me.”

She added: “If more people would focus on these topics, then less people would be gunned down.”

Reynolds worries sometimes that his books might be read as “trauma porn” by people who didn’t grow up where he did, where “your neighbor could be a schoolteacher, federal government workers, but then you also had dope boys.” But, he added, referring to “Long Way Down,” “my shorties, my kids, my family, they read it, and they know exactly what this book is about.”

His own emotional growth was nurtured by his mother and a group of childhood friends with whom he’d run around town. They went to each other’s football games and Reynolds’ poetry slams, or took joy rides in his mother’s Mazda. “We were just kids. We were playing around,” Reynolds said. “It just so happens that some of us died, and some of us got caught up.”

For him, though, it was his friends who kept him out of trouble and allowed him to be his full self, he said. “I could always say to them, ‘It hurts. It hurts,’ and they could hold that.”

Myers, who has known Reynolds since his early days in New York City, has observed Reynolds’ work “changing, moving, growing with him,” and Reynolds’ editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, agreed. “He never wants to do what he’s done before,” she said. “He is always pushing his own abilities to play within the different formats, to give kids other ways to have a reading experience.”

Reynolds said he might write for adults one day, but he’ll never stop writing for young people. “I just think it's a wonderful experience to sit down at the page with such intention,” he said.

One student in Baltimore asked the author whether the street rules in “Long Way Down” — no crying, no snitching, get revenge — were ones kids like her should be following.

“It’s complicated,” Reynolds said. He explained that he doesn’t advocate violence, but he understands the “pain and the anger” underpinning the desire for revenge.

“I think your generation has to start grappling with whether or not those rules work for you in your time,” he told the middle schoolers. “My job,” he said, “is to say, ‘I understand. I see you.’ ”

This article originally appeared in

When the writer Jason Reynolds speaks to young people, he rarely starts by talking about books.

Jason Reynolds Is on a Mission

It was given to Emily Doe, the name that identified her during the 2016 trial of Brock Turner, the Stanford University student charged with sexually assaulting her. He was found guilty, and at his sentencing hearing, she read a victim impact statement that would later be published on BuzzFeed and read aloud on CNN and the floor of Congress, stoking outrage that preceded the broader #MeToo movement.

But while millions of people read or heard her words, many in Miller’s life didn’t know she was Emily Doe until The New York Times reported it this month.

“It let me have a life in which this never happened,” she said of her decision to keep the assault and trial hidden. She wanted a chance to define herself, she said, beyond “the nameless, faceless, half-naked body from this case.”

“Know My Name,” her memoir coming out Tuesday, chronicles how she has tried to make sense of what happened and how it changed her life. She fleshes out her story beyond being a victim — although she does write unflinchingly of the indignities she endured after the assault, including an hourslong exam at the hospital to collect physical evidence for a rape kit. Fourteen people saw her unclothed and unconscious; even more saw pictures of her that way in court.

“There’s no sense of boundaries,” Miller, 27, said. The scrutiny of the case often felt profoundly invasive, and when it ended, she felt discarded by the authorities involved. “They just sort of say, ‘All right, it’s over. Go back to your life.’ And you step out and you say, ‘What life?’”

‘I Had No Headline’

On Jan. 17, 2015, Chanel Miller was seven months out of college and working at an educational technology startup when she decided to accompany her younger sister to a Stanford fraternity party. She remembers going, having some drinks and, hours later, regaining consciousness in the hospital.

What happened in between she pieced together primarily from news reports. She was found unconscious behind a dumpster with Turner on top of her, she said, by two graduate students who intervened and held Turner until the authorities arrived. He was arrested and later charged with three counts of felony sexual assault.

The trial began in March 2016 and captivated the public, with headlines often describing Turner as the “Stanford swimmer.” “It had a prestigious university, it had an Olympic hopeful, an athlete, heroes who stepped in,” said Alaleh Kianerci, the district attorney who represented Miller in court. “I just really tried to make sure that Chanel didn’t get too caught up in that.”

But it seemed unavoidable. “I remember thinking, after reading the news about him, that I wished I had more extracurriculars,” Miller said. “The fact that I had no headline, it was just so clear to me that I was nobody.”

Later in March, Turner was convicted of the three charges and faced up to 14 years in prison. In June 2016, however, the presiding judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced him to a mere six months in county jail, of which he served three. Turner lost his swimming scholarship at Stanford and registered as a sex offender. Through his attorney, he declined to comment.

Persky’s sentence prompted a backlash, with many criticizing it as too lenient. Voters recalled him in 2018, the first such action against a California judge in decades. He declined to comment.

New Experiences

In the year between the assault and the trial, Miller alternated between panic attacks, dissociation and “exploding with rage.” She eventually quit her job and moved across the country, first to Rhode Island for an art program and then to Philadelphia to live with her boyfriend. She tried to distract herself by trying new experiences, like stand-up comedy and scuba diving.

She wrote her statement at a moment she felt particularly worn down by the trial, after she learned the probation officer on the case had twisted her words to recommend a moderate county-jail sentence for Turner and, adding insult to injury, misidentified her as white (she is half Chinese).

Incensed, she decided that her statement “would no longer be a sad journal entry about my feelings. My DA had asked me to address the judge directly, but I would speak directly to Brock,” she writes in the book.

Her letter addressed him starting with the second sentence: “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.”

“I’ve read dozens of these letters,” said Kianerci, the district attorney, “but hers was different. She has an incredible ability to describe in excruciating and vivid detail what victims go through.”

Her statement went viral, yet most in her life remained unaware of the trial, something she now thinks may have stalled her recovery. “Shame grows when it’s in a contained space,” Miller said. “As soon as you let a little bit of air in, the shame loses its power.”

Women across the country sent her letters of support. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that imposed mandatory minimum sentences in sexual assault cases. Her words were used to make sure “no future Brock Turners get a slap on the wrist,” Kianerci said.

Miller began working with a therapist, disclosing that she had been sexually assaulted. The therapist, unaware Miller was the victim in the Stanford case, urged her to read the statement that so many people were sharing online.

‘Chorus of Voices’

Philippa Brophy, a literary agent, had already read Miller’s statement when a mutual family friend told her Miller was interested in writing a book. Brophy went to Andrea Schulz, the editor-in-chief of Viking, who promptly snatched up the proposal.

Miller often wrote between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m., when she felt comforted knowing that loved ones were sleeping and she could be “completely honest with how I’m feeling and not have to worry about protecting other people.”

In an interview late last month, she mentioned the movie “The Farewell,” in which a Chinese American character, played by Awkwafina, avoids discussing her grandmother’s terminal cancer with her. Miller said she tried to do the same with her family and friends, putting on a brave face to shield them from her pain.

“An incredible thing I’ve learned is the people who love you want to suffer with you,” she said. “I spent so much energy trying to protect them from everything, when the whole time, they really did just want to be beside me, weathering the storm.”

A college friend, Alison Green, said the news that Miller was Emily Doe “completely took my breath away.” She recalled reading her impact letter. “It’s so strange to think that this whole time it was Chanel,” she said, “because her words changed me without even knowing they were her words.”

Miller credited the #MeToo movement and the many women coming forward as “the reason why I feel like I can come out now.”

She and Schulz, her editor, spoke to each other weekly while they worked on the book. “I kept hearing in what was happening around us these echoes of the outrage that she had loosed, and the chorus of voices that joined in to hers to say, ‘This is happening to us, too,’” Schulz said.

Acceptance

On a walk through her neighborhood in San Francisco, Miller stopped to examine a tree with white blossoms and an intoxicating scent. She circled it several times until she spotted a lime. “Wait, there’s no way a lime tree smells this good,” she said, inhaling deeply. At her apartment, she hummed in delight while eating dessert. She shared a joke from one of her old comedy sets and said she wanted to improve her Mandarin.

There is still trauma, she said, but what’s changing is “the time it takes for me to come back from it, and my ability to get on my own two feet each time it ambushes me again.” She frequently clenches her fist, a vestigial habit from the trial. Miller said she’s learned “to incorporate my body into all conversations.”

“Before, I wanted the assault to not be a part of my life, and that was the goal,” she added. “Now it’s accepting that it will always be a part of my life, and I just figure out where it lives inside my life.”

In 2014, a few weeks before Miller graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a gunman killed six people nearby before taking his own life. Hearing the father of one of the victims speak at a vigil, Miller realized his ability to “so quickly convert his grief into action and articulation” was motivated by a desire to protect others from experiencing a similar pain.

“There’s never going to be a day where he’s like, ‘I’m moving on,’” she said. “I feel the same.”

She's Sharing Her Story and Giving Her Name

SAN FRANCISCO — Until recently, when friends came to Chanel Miller’s apartment, she would throw a bag over the Glamour Woman of the Year award that she received in 2016.

During a speech this month celebrating her team’s World Cup victory, Megan Rapinoe ended with a plea to fans. “We have to be better,” she said, urging all of them to consider how they could effect change in their communities. “It’s our responsibility to make this world a better place.”

Now, Rapinoe, a captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team, will transfer that message into a book. The untitled project, acquired by Penguin Press and expected to be out in fall 2020, will include anecdotes from Rapinoe’s life, said the Penguin Press president and editor-in-chief Ann Godoff, who made the deal, but its message will go beyond sports.

“A lot of women, great women soccer players, have written memoirs,” Godoff said. “Megan has a different platform.” While watching the World Cup, she said, “I thought, ‘Here’s a woman who is comfortable in her own skin,’” and noted her own children’s excitement about Rapinoe’s authenticity.

“She’s just operating from this very honest and straightforward and ‘This is who I am’ place,” Godoff said. “I think that’s what many people aspire to.”

In an email, Rapinoe said she is excited to share her story with readers. “I hope this book will inspire people to find what they can do, and in turn inspire other people around them to do the same,” she said.

Rapinoe has spoken out on social justice issues and politics, particularly LGBTQ rights and pay equity for women. These issues will also be addressed in the book, Godoff said.

“Coming from that very honest and authentic place and being able to find a way to put that on the page,” she said, “I think will make a very lasting book.” Godoff declined to say how much the publisher is paying Rapinoe.

The soccer star has also signed on to do a middle-grade book with Razorbill, a division of Penguin Young Readers, which will address “the power young people have within their own communities and the world at large,” according to a statement. Her overall message, she said, is that “we can change the world in one generation, and have one hell of a time doing it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/books/megan-rapinoe-soccer-world-cup.html" id="9b0fe0d8-2d4e-36de-aacc-853643d88ae2">The New York Times</a>.

(Book News)

Rapinoe Scores Again, but This Time It's a Book Deal

In the lawsuit, Roberts, author of best-sellers such as “The Liar” and “Vision in White,” is asking for damages of at least $25,000 from the novelist, Cristiane Serruya, as well as for sales of her books to be stopped unless all plagiarized material is removed from them. Roberts said she would donate all of the money to a literacy organization in Brazil.

The suit follows other plagiarism accusations against Serruya. She could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but in an email to Roberts’ publicist, Serruya said she “never intentionally plagiarized anyone.”

“I was fooled by some ‘mentors’ and ‘coachers’ who told me that ‘More, more, more, fast, fast, fast,’ ” she wrote, and blamed ghostwriters she had hired on freelance marketplace Fiverr for the overlap between her books and others.

Roberts said the material lifted from her books was often word for word.

For example, a passage in “The Liar,” published in 2015, reads: “She was beautiful. A man didn’t get to be just shy of his thirtieth birthday without seeing some beautiful women, even if it was just on a movie screen. But this one, in the flesh, was one quick wow.”

A passage in “Royal Affair” by Serruya, published in 2018, reads: “She was beautiful. A man didn’t get to be just shy of his thirty-seventh birthday without seeing some beautiful women, even if it was just on a movie screen. But that was not the case with Ludwig, who’d had more than his share of extraordinarily beautiful women. But this woman, in the flesh, was superlative.”

Two months ago, readers discovered similarities between Serruya’s novel “Royal Love” and “The Duchess War” by Courtney Milan. Since then, dozens of other novelists — including Tessa Dawn, Loretta Chase and Lynne Graham — made similar accusations, some of them sharing their findings on Twitter with the hashtag #CopyPasteCris. More than 40 writers and nearly 100 books are involved so far.

“A lot of the other writers involved in this, they don’t have the money to fight it,” Roberts said. “I do have the money.”

In a series of blog posts in February, Roberts railed against a “sick, greedy, opportunistic culture” that she said is developing because of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, a self-publishing platform in which authors are paid based on how many pages of their books readers read — a system that “incentivizes the fast and more,” she wrote.

“It affects the entire industry, and it corrupts a really honorable profession,” said Roberts. “It makes writers look like hacks.”

An Amazon spokeswoman said the company takes “violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously,” adding that Serruya’s books have been removed from the Amazon marketplace.

That is not enough for Roberts. "I swear I’ll do whatever I can,” she wrote in one of her blog posts, “use whatever resources, connections, clout, megaphone I have to out every damn one of you.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/books/nora-roberts-plagiarism.html" id="5b378943-a65e-3870-a470-b3c8827a9bc5">The New York Times</a>.

Writer Nora Roberts on Wednesday sued a Brazilian romance novelist for copyright infringement, accusing her of copying or paraphrasing material from 10 of Roberts’ books.

Nora Roberts Sues Brazilian Writer Who She Says Plagiarized Her Work

The decision came after Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives refused to vote on a bill that would have prohibited conversion therapy, a discredited practice that proponents claim can change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The measure passed the Senate this month.

“I firmly believe that the idea that there are people in our society who need treatment because of their gender identity or whom they love is not only absurd, it is harmful to so many children and young adults who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said in a statement last week announcing his plans.

The original bill, introduced by Sens. Eduardo Bhatia and Zoé Laboy Alvarado last spring, sought to ban conversion therapy among licensed medical professionals and in religious institutions that receive state funding.

The House refused to vote on the bill or hold public hearings for survivors of conversion therapy. House Speaker Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló said this week that there was little evidence the practice was widely used in Puerto Rico. Members of the House also felt that the definition of conversion therapy was “too broad” and could potentially include other types of rehabilitation therapy, such as for drug addiction, he said.

Rodríguez Aguiló insisted the decision had “nothing to do” with discrimination against the LGBT community. “This is purely about a legislation that lacks information, and we want to act based on the information that can be offered,” he said.

Laboy Alvarado said the House’s decision was “erroneous, wrong, and causes harm to our youth.”

She added, “The reality is that even if only one young person was put through it, that’s enough because of the harm that we’re causing them and our responsibility to protect minors.”

Alejandro Santos Calderón, an activist who said he was forced to undergo conversion therapy in Puerto Rico, interpreted the House’s actions as an attempt to silence gay rights activists.

“The LGBT community is tired, ignored, feels invalidated,” he said.

Santos Calderón works with a number of organizations, including the transgender task force of Coordinadora Paz Para Las Mujeres, a women’s rights organization. He grew up in an evangelical Christian household, but he left the church because officials continually tried to help him “rid himself of the ‘demon of homosexuality,’ ” he said.

“In Puerto Rico, there is no space where I can practice my spirituality,” Santos Calderón said. Almost 90 percent of the country identifies as either Catholic or Protestant, according to a 2014 Pew Center study.

The executive order requires all institutions seeking a license to practice medicine to certify that they will not offer conversion therapy, according to a news release from Rosselló's office.

The push to ban gay conversion therapy has accelerated across the United States in recent years. The practice has been banned in 15 states and in Washington, D.C., so far. The Colorado Senate this week passed a bill to prohibit the practice as well, and Gov. Jared Polis has said he will sign it.

Conversion therapy, which is based on the idea that homosexuality is a mental disorder that can be treated or cured, has been widely condemned by rights groups and discredited by mental health professionals for the “serious potential harm” it can cause, according to a report issued by the American Psychological Association and 12 other organizations.

“Today we take a step forward to raise awareness among the people about this type of practice that causes pain and suffering,” Rosselló said Wednesday.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/us/puerto-rico-conversion-therapy.html" id="ea4a2711-bdcc-3044-a3e9-2b8bfc41fe7e">The New York Times</a>.

The governor of Puerto Rico signed an executive order Wednesday banning so-called conversion therapy for gay or transgender minors on the island.

Governor of Puerto Rico Signs Executive Order Banning 'Conversion Therapy' for Minors

A few days before Christmas, a group of 20 or so people crowded into Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli’s living room. Luiselli dipped in and out among her guests, serving mulled wine as school-aged children from Still Waters in a Storm, an educational center in New York City focused on reading and writing, prepared to perform an original musical adapted from Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” The children had worked with the center’s founder, Stephen Haff, to translate the book from the Spanish and write songs reinterpreting the story with a chorus of migrant children. By the time Haff told the children to find their spots on the small makeshift stage, the seats had filled up, so Luiselli sat on the floor next to her 9-year-old daughter, Maia. It wasn’t the first time Luiselli had seen the show, but she still cried, as did her daughter, when the children sang songs with lyrics like, “Innocence needs a home.”

The experiences of asylum-seeking children from Latin America have preoccupied Luiselli for several years now and serve as a central theme in her latest book about a family road trip across the United States. “Lost Children Archive,” which will be published by Knopf next week, is Luiselli’s fifth book, and the first of her novels to be written in English.

When Luiselli, 35, started writing “Lost Children Archive” in the summer of 2014, she struggled with using it “as a loudspeaker for all of my political rage.” She had volunteered as a court translator for child refugees from Latin America and was therefore familiar with the migration crisis. She set aside the novel and wrote “Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions,” a meditation on the children’s stories and the circumstances that brought them to the United States. It was formatted after the questionnaire the court had her use to interview the children and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2017. Afterward, Luiselli said, she was able to return to her novel and offer “more open questions and open ends instead of political stances that are too loud and obvious by themselves.”

The formal inventiveness of “Tell Me How It Ends” is characteristic of all of Luiselli’s former work. Diego Rabasa, who has edited Luiselli’s books with Sexto Piso, an independent press in Mexico City, said her first book, “Papeles Falsos” (translated as “Sidewalks” in English), contained elements of literary, personal and travel essays. “There has always been a distinct aura of brilliance and intelligence surrounding her,” said Rabasa. “What dazzled us was the audacity of a young writer who was starting on such an original path.”

Luiselli characterized her first book, which was rejected by several publishing houses before it was acquired by Sexto Piso, as an attempt to “write myself into my mother tongue” after a lifetime living away from Mexico. She had always studied in English, so when it came to Spanish, “I never had the inflections of the people my age. It didn’t get renewed with slang and street talk.”

Luiselli first left Mexico at the age of 2, when her father moved the family to Madison, Wisconsin, to complete his doctorate. From there, her father’s work as a diplomat took them to Costa Rica, South Korea and South Africa, where they arrived in 1994, shortly after Mandela’s historic election. By then, her mother had left the family to join the Zapatista movement in Mexico. “I come from a matriarchal line of women who have always been very involved politically and socially,” she said, referring also to her grandmother, who worked with indigenous communities in Puebla, Mexico. After attending boarding school in India, she decided, as she puts it, “I need to go back to Mexico and become Mexican,” Luiselli recalled. She was 19 when she enrolled at the National Autonomous University of Mexico to major in philosophy and began writing there.

Luiselli followed “Papeles Falsos” in 2011 with a novel, “Los Ingrávidos” (“Faces in the Crowd”). It has been translated into 20 languages. Rabasa noted that the book remains one of Sexto Piso’s most popular and is reprinted every year. “The Story of my Teeth,” Luiselli’s second novel, was the product of a collaboration with Jumex factory workers in Mexico, in which she sent them chapters, and they helped her shape the plot. Her books always reflect a deep plunge into her sensibilities — books and cultural references, and even real people and places where she’s been. In “Lost Children Archive,” for instance, Still Waters in a Storm is mentioned, as are Haff, obscure Italian writers and Ezra Pound.

“I have never written a novel that just sort of springs from the head of Zeus, from an absolute space of fiction,” Luiselli said. “I always begin my work documenting my everyday.”

“She’s really wrestling with a certain strand of Latino and Latin American identity in the U.S. in this political moment,” said novelist Daniel Alarcón, who has sat on panels with Luiselli. In “Tell Me How It Ends,” in particular, he said, “she confronts directly questions of privilege and gaze, at the same time wrestling with a political moment that affects not just all Latinos but all Americans.”

“Without knowing it or planning to, she has opened doors,” said her friend, writer Laia Jufresa, who told me she never imagined a Mexican writer could plausibly achieve the number of translations, awards or critical acclaim Luiselli has in her early career.

Both novelist Francisco Goldman and Rabasa mentioned the — “insufferable,” in Goldman’s words — macho culture of Mexican literature. Goldman rattled off a list of woman writers, besides Luiselli, who have been causing a seismic shift in the country’s literary world over the last decade: Gabriela Jauregui, Guadalupe Nettel, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Jufresa and Fernanda Melchor.

Argentine novelist Samanta Schweblin, whose second book, “Mouthful of Birds,” was published in January, said Luiselli’s vision is a cross between the Latin American and the North American views of the world. “Both visions are so nostalgic, critical, loving and painful at the same time. Valeria belongs to both territories and therefore understands their signals, but at the same time she seems to always understand herself as a foreigner,” wrote Schweblin in a recent email. Perhaps, she said, having one foot in each world is why Luiselli’s literature is charged with the lucidness of estrangement.

Luiselli is currently exploring different art forms altogether. She recently received an Art for Justice fellowship to research and write about mass incarceration in the United States, with an emphasis on detention centers. “The same companies own immigration jails and normal jails,” she said, and many don’t understand that “immigration detention and mass incarceration are exactly the same thing.”

She started a literary program to teach creative writing to girls in a detention center in upstate New York. She is also working on a performance piece related to mass incarceration and violence against women with poet Natalie Diaz. In the fall, she will begin a two-year residency at Bard College.

Luiselli lives in the Bronx borough of New York City and jokes that she is raising her daughter, whose father is Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, in a household full of women (her niece lives with her, and her mother visits often). “I feel my female bonds stronger than ever in my life, the way that women can group and discuss and think politically, and also just how friends can get together and be a network of support,” Luiselli said.

“Lost Children Archive” was in large part a response to seeing her daughter try to interpret the current migration crisis. “Children can add a tinge of bizarreness to what is possibly accepted as normal but actually is not,” Luiselli said. Her approach is to discuss issues with her daughter “in a way that she is not scared — that she finds the right balance between a certain rage or outrage and clarity to imagine possible change.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/valeria-luiselli-lost-children-archive.html" id="7f94a471-6994-3bcf-a1c4-14e6995ab78b">The New York Times</a>.

Speaking for Children, Whatever the Language

(Profile)

Writing has never been a lucrative career choice, but a recent study by The Authors Guild, a professional organization for book writers, shows that it may not even be a livable one anymore. According to the survey results, the median pay for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017, and that number decreased to $6,080 when part-time writers were considered. The latter figure reflects a 42 percent drop since 2009, when the median was $10,500. These findings are the result of an expansive 2018 study of more than 5,000 published book authors, across genres and including both traditional and self-published writers.

“In the 20th century, a good literary writer could earn a middle class living just writing,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of The Authors Guild, citing William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. Now, most writers need to supplement their income with speaking engagements or teaching. Strictly book-related income — which is to say royalties and advances — are also down, almost 30 percent for full-time writers since 2009.

Writing for magazines and newspapers was once a solid source of additional income for professional writers, but the decline in freelance journalism and pay has meant less opportunity for authors to write for pay. Many print publications, which offered the highest rate, have been shuttered altogether.

The decline in earnings are also largely because of Amazon’s lion’s share of the self-publishing, e-book and resale market, according to Rasenberger. The conglomerate charges commission and marketing fees to publishers that Rasenberger said essentially prevent their books from being buried on the site. Small and independent publishers, which have fewer resources and bargaining power, have been particularly hard hit. Book publishing companies are passing these losses along to writers in the form of lower royalties and advances, and authors also lose out on income from books resold on the platform.

In some ways, these changes are in line with a general shift toward a gig economy or “hustling,” in which people juggle an assortment of jobs to make up for the lack of a stable income. But the writing industry as a whole has always eluded standardization in pay. In a conversation with Manjula Martin in the book “Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living,” edited by Martin, Cheryl Strayed said, “There’s no other job in the world where you get your master’s degree in that field and you’re like, Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million!”

In a recent call, Martin said “the people who are able to practice the trade of authoring are people who have other sources of income,” adding that this creates barriers of entry and limits the types of stories that reach a wide audience. There is also, she added, a devaluation of writing in which it is often viewed as a hobby as opposed to a valuable vocation.

“Everyone thinks they can write, because everybody writes,” said Rasenberger, referring to the proliferation of casual texting, emailing and tweeting. But she distinguishes these from professional writers “who have been working on their craft and art of writing for years.”

“What a professional writer can convey in written word is far superior to what the rest of us can do,” Rasenberger said. “As a society we need that, because it’s a way to crystallize ideas, make us see things in a new way and create understanding of who we are as a people, where we are today and where we’re going.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer.html" id="6c9134fa-8036-3513-a91b-2465e59c6d86">The New York Times</a>.

(Books News)

Does It Pay to Be a Writer?

NEW YORK — In millions of households across the country, on New Year’s Eve all eyes are on New York City where hundreds of thousands gather to watch a bejeweled, illuminated ball make its slow descent to mark the new year. Those who decide to make the pilgrimage in person start to fill Times Square in the morning. They settle in streetside, often bundled against the cold. In New York homes, like the one I was raised in, relatives brine the pork shoulder that will become pernil, then get prettied up for evening festivities.

People have been making their way to midtown Manhattan for the midnight revel in Times Square since 1904, when the owner of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs, organized a celebration to commemorate the opening of the paper’s new headquarters in Times Square. (Ochs had also successfully lobbied to have the name changed from Longacre Square.) The ball drop was introduced in 1907.

For many Latinos, a new year is an almost magical chance for us to wipe the slate clean when the clock strikes midnight. As Gloria Estefan once sang, “Y vamos abriendo puertas, y vamos cerrando heridas” — we open new doors and close old wounds.

There are rituals that help usher in a better and brighter new year, like sweeping the house on New Year’s Eve to get rid of bad luck and make room for good luck. Brazilians wear white, which is said to bring good fortune. For Colombians, new, yellow underwear is bought to attract prosperity. Cousins of mine eat 12 grapes at midnight, one by one, and silently recite as many wishes, while my aunt burns incense to drive out any lingering bad juju.

Wishing, like watching the ball drop, is that rare thing in this city: an activity that is absolutely free. Desires range from the personal to the universal. In Times Square in 1942, as World War II raged, a young man wished for “all the money in the world,” while a young woman wished “that the war will be over soon.”

On New Year’s Eve in 2009, I was persuaded by a tourist friend to go to Times Square. As a self-respecting New Yorker who had already spent plenty of time in the area, I reluctantly trekked there, thankful for the unseasonably warm weather. We arrived around 6 p.m. and squeezed into the crowd on 45th Street, several blocks from where the ball was perched. As I looked up at it, the ball seemed much smaller than it did on television. Still, I fixed my gaze on it during the countdown, convinced it contained some sort of magic.

But the magic isn’t in the ball exactly. It’s in how all those gathered in Times Square and all those watching at home are united, for just one minute, in a flurry of hope and good wishes that appears like confetti and then is dispersed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/nyregion/vintage-photos-times-square-new-years-eve.html" id="1915b388-fb11-3657-a562-9d12d7352d34">The New York Times</a>.

It's Always Been a Ball: Vintage Fashion and Ecstatic Crowds

(Past Tense)

As a tween, whenever my dad wanted me to do something for him, like deposit a check or write a letter or call customer service, he’d stop mid-instruction, give me a stern look and ask, “Are you writing this down?” Imagine a 12-year-old eye roll here. To my mind, I had an airtight system in place, relying on made-up medleys with a simple beat: check, letter, call Time Warner; check, letter, call Time Warner. If this sounds like a terrible strategy: You’re right, and it rarely worked.

My dad’s instincts were on point. We now know that the brain truly can’t be trusted to hold or remember more than a few thoughts at a time. That’s why I decided to pick up bullet journaling, a system created by Ryder Carroll that organizes your to-do list, your schedule and your journal in one notebook while giving you free rein to design it according to your lifestyle. It has become a social media sensation over the last few years, with more than 3 million related posts on Instagram alone and a dedicated following inspired to create blogs and innovations to the original system. I was drawn in by its flexibility and the beautiful spreads created by others, but in practice, I couldn’t keep up the momentum.

In his new book, “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future,” Carroll goes back to basics, explaining the practice and his reasoning behind each element, which include an index or table of contents, a future log for upcoming events or tasks, and daily and monthly logs for more granular planning. One can create custom collections, blank pages that can take any form, even just a simple list. “It’s not about how your journal looks, it’s about how it makes you feel and how effective it is,” writes Carroll in “The Bullet Journal Method.”

He clarifies ways to use the bullet journal for every step of project management: brainstorming, determining the desired outcome (he even recommends writing a mission statement at the top of the project’s collection page), defining subcollections and doing necessary research.

For longer-term projects or those that contain many moving parts, like learning to cook, Carroll recommends breaking them down into sprints — “independent, self-contained projects” that can be completed within two weeks or a month — and creating collection pages to track your progress.

I decided to nix the elaborate spreads and give bullet journaling another try, this time with the help of another book, “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” by David Allen, which taught me to clarify and organize my tasks more effectively.

— Ask yourself: Is this actionable?

“The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things,” wrote Allen in “Getting Things Done.” Most to-do lists tend to contain a mix of projects, notes and reminders, which muddles its contents and “simply remind you that you are overwhelmed.” According to Allen’s system, we should categorize information into three categories: “next actions,” which by his standards must be “descriptive of a physical behavior”; “projects,” broadly defined as anything with more than one action step; and “reference material,” such as those articles saved in your Bookmarks tab or the nail art ideas on your Pinterest board.

One major challenge was reckoning with all the projects on my list. Meal prep, for instance, which I often list but rarely do, is actually a project in disguise, because it requires more than one action to be marked as complete. My subpar cooking skills require that I look up a recipe and mentally prepare for the task. Creating a grocery list and shopping for food also precede the act of cooking. By simply writing “meal prep,” I was forcing my brain to keep working to fill the space between the outcome and how to get there. “Thinking in a concentrated manner to define desired outcomes and requisite next actions is something few people feel they have to do (until they have to),” wrote Allen.

— Make more than one to-do list.

According to Allen, “Once you know how to process your stuff and what to organize, you really just need to create and manage lists.” Yes, plural.

Allen recommends grouping items according to the conditions under which they must be completed. It may be useful, for instance, to group errands together, so that if you’re out, you can refer to the list for other places you need to go. Similarly, if you have a regular meeting with your boss, it’s helpful to have an agenda with topics to cover.

With this foundation, I returned to set up my new bullet journal.

“Getting Things Done” and “The Bullet Journal Method” work well together, because the bullet journal’s flexibility allows for the type of ad hoc lists that Allen recommends. I created lists like “Calls” or “At Home” for tasks I couldn’t do anywhere else. My daily log, which is integral to the bullet journaling system and Carroll describes as “a catchall, designed to hold our thoughts until we’re ready to sort them out,” had always been my de facto to-do list in my previous bullet journaling attempts. Instead, it became a temporary holding space until these tasks, projects, ideas or reminders could be sorted into their appropriate lists or collections (or in my calendar).

— OK, now what?

In an ideal world, an app would feed me tasks like a Pez candy dispenser, one-by-one and only when I have the time and energy to do them. Instead, both Allen and Carroll insist on reflection and trusting your gut. Ugh. You mean I can’t just go on autopilot?

Both writers encourage engaging regularly with your tasks, projects and thoughts. “The goal is getting into the habit of checking in with yourself, asking small whys. Over time, you get better at answering these questions. You’re refining your beliefs, your values, your ability to spot your weaknesses and your strengths,” wrote Carroll.

I’m still new to this, so I can’t say that I’ve experienced “mind like water” or “flow” (Allen’s words) or any other euphemism for not feeling like your mind is spilling over with thoughts and ideas. But if, as Allen wrote, “The key is to feel as good about what you’re not doing as about what you are doing at that moment,” I guess I’ve achieved a certain kind of clarity.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/books/how-to-bullet-journal.html" id="f93a8471-555a-3ec3-a2ad-c32ea219785f">The New York Times</a>.

The Art of Bullet Journaling and the Improved To-Do List

(Self-Helped)

With John Kelly stepping down from his position as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, the search is on for a replacement. Trump’s top pick, Nick Ayers, who works for the vice president, turned down the job. The appointment holds particular weight as Trump heads into the most challenging year of his presidency with a newly elected Democratic House that’s vowed tougher oversight when they take over next month. These books explore the significance of the role and former advisers’ experience holding it.

THE GATEKEEPERSHow the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every PresidencyBy Chris Whipple384 pp. Crown. (2017)

Whipple chronicles how chiefs of staffs from Richard Nixon’s presidency to Barack Obama’s have influenced each president’s success. He interviewed all 17 of the living men who had held the position as well as two former presidents and covers them in chronological order, starting with Nixon’s H.R. Haldeman, whose tenure was a model for the way the role is viewed today: as a centralized advisory role with oversize power and access.

“WORK HARD, STUDY … AND KEEP OUT OF POLITICS!"Adventures and Lessons From an Unexpected Public LifeBy James A. Baker III with Steve Fiffer496 pp. Northwestern University Press. (2006)

Baker, who was chief of staff twice, first for Ronald Reagan and then for George H.W. Bush, writes about that experience in this memoir, where he “offers a more personal account that implicitly contrasts the past with the present, and is the more telling for its restraint,” according to our reviewer. Baker was drawn to politics by Bush, his longtime tennis doubles partner, when he joined Bush’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1970. Though the campaign failed, Bush helped him get his first Washington job five years later as the secretary of commerce in the Ford administration, and his political savvy caught the eye of the next two Republican presidents.

THE HALDEMAN DIARIESInside the Nixon White HouseBy H.R. Haldeman698 pp. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. (1994)

Haldeman, who served 18 months in prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up, said he shared his diaries from his time in the White House because they “provide valuable insights for historians, journalists and scholars, as well as the general public.” “Set down in dry, deadpan prose, the diaries give the reader a minutely detailed portrait of a White House obsessed with image and spin control, a White House in which paranoia, manipulation, self-pity and cynicism reigned supreme,” wrote our reviewer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/books/chief-of-staff-president-trump.html" id="90fdfb7e-8a10-374f-a26f-2065177625f9">The New York Times</a>.

(Newsbook)

While Trump Seeks New Chief of Staff, These Three Books Show Why His Next Pick Matters

<h1>NEW YORK — Summer hasn’t (officially) started yet, but the literary world is already revving up for September: Publishing houses have started sending out their fall releases, and in New York, the Brooklyn Book Festival, one of the city’s largest book events, is assembling this year’s roster.</h1>

Mira Jacob, Rebecca Traister, N.K. Jemisin and Meg Wolitzer are among the more than 150 writers confirmed to attend the festival, which runs Sept. 16-23. That number is sure to balloon by the end of the summer; last year, more than 300 authors participated. The event includes a full day of adult programming and another for children.

Mo Willems is this year’s winner of the Best of Brooklyn award, which is presented annually to a writer who “exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn.” Willems is the first picture-book author to receive the award and joins such previous winners as Jacqueline Woodson, Colson Whitehead and James McBride.

Willems, the Caldecott-winning author of books like “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale” and “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” was one of the writers who “jumped right on board” when the Brooklyn Book Festival began in 2006, Liz Koch, one of the festival’s co-producers, said.

“This year, with the fifth anniversary of our Children’s Day, we felt like it would be a wonderful moment to celebrate an iconic children’s book author,” Koch said, adding that it was also a way of thanking him for his support.

“Brooklyn is where I found the Pigeons and Knuffle Bunnies that were to become my muses,” Willems said in a statement, “as well as the community of writers, thinkers and doers that would excite and challenge me to do my best work.”

The festival poster, which will be revealed in early July, will be designed by children’s book illustrator Raúl Colón.

Nearly 200 events will take place during the festival and across all five boroughs of New York City, some dealing with issues such as climate change, activism, sexuality, race and immigration, said Carolyn Greer, who produces the festival’s nonfiction content. The events outside Brooklyn, which will take place in bookstores, parks, bars, canoes and libraries, are meant to reach people who “don’t leave their neighborhoods,” Greer said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/books/brooklyn-book-festival.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Brooklyn Book Festival names Mo Willems 'Best of Brooklyn'

Mo Willems is this year’s winner of the Best of Brooklyn award, which is presented annually to a writer who “exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn.” Willems is the first picture-book author to receive the award and joins such previous winners as Jacqueline Woodson, Colson Whitehead and James McBride.

During the interview on Thursday to discuss “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,” a historical examination of same-sex relations in the Victorian era and the ways in which they were criminalized, she told the BBC Radio host, Matthew Sweet, that she found “several dozen executions” of men accused of having sex with other men.

“Several dozen executions?” he asked, later adding: “I don’t think you’re right about this.”

Sweet said that was a mistake based on a misunderstanding of the legal term “death recorded.”

“It doesn’t mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon,” Sweet said. "I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

After a pause, Wolf said, “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.”

A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”

A spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is publishing “Outrages” in the United States, referred to the issue as an “unfortunate error” but said, “we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds.”

Best-selling author Naomi Wolf said Friday that she was correcting portions of her latest book after an awkward radio interview in which she was alerted to major errors in it.

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