Suarez was recently awarded first prize at the International Latino Book Awards for Best Collection of Short Stories in English for A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Press, 2019). Flatiron has since apologized for how it positioned and publicized the novel, and its parent company, Macmillan, has pledged to substantially increase its numbers of Latinx authors and staff.

Her publisher, Flatiron, was criticized for promoting a soap opera-ish page turner as the immigration novel of our times-and throwing a book party with barbed-wire-festooned centerpieces-while overlooking talented Latinx authors who have written about the subject with greater nuance and complexity. She received a seven-figure advance for her book, which has raised questions about how the publishing industry chooses which books, and writers, to aggressively promote, how authors approach writing about marginalized people from other cultures, and how the story of immigration, one of the most politically charged issues in the United States today, gets told.Īs education director at GrubStreet, a nonprofit writing center in Boston, Suarez (GRS’12), who has an MFA in creative writing, spends a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions.Ĭummins has been attacked on social media for sensationalizing the Mexican migration with lurid violence and stereotypical characters. Not many people have a more informed perspective on the controversy swirling around American Dirt, the wildly hyped best-selling novel about a Mexican mother and her son escaping to the United States, than Latino writer Dariel Suarez.Īmerican Dirt’s author, Jeanine Cummins, identifies herself as white and Latina.

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