Novelists From The United States

"I consider Toni Morrison the patron saint of my writing. To write with her level of honesty and clarity is my North Star. Virginia Woolf is referenced in this book again and again, both for her work and for her tragic life, which, I suppose, are one and the same. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz became a model for my rebellion. And the list goes on and on. None of my books could have been written without these extraordinary authors. I'm indebted to all the women who came before, those who paved the way as well as those whose talents were extinguished, buried, or sublimated because the world was afraid of their strength. It's thanks to their rebellions, big and small, that I get to lead this extraordinary life-that is, a life completely of my choosing. I am myself in a world that pressures me to be otherwise, a world that doesn't love me, wasn't for me."

"Kids really do see through our bull and have shorter attention spans."

"(Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?) Money. White authors often write about money (or don’t) in a way that disregards the realities of most people. It’s as if they assume that everyone simply has it. Or at least their readers. I remember reading “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong, many years ago, for instance, and getting very angry when the protagonist went to Europe for months with no concern for money or a job. I assumed she was relying on family money, but it was never explained. It took me out of the text because I couldn’t get over it. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did. Marginalized people could never in their wildest dreams make these kinds of choices. That’s why I always write about the financial realities of my characters. I don’t expect everyone to assume what they are. Those details really matter to me."

"I grew up thinking I didn't matter, that no one cared what I had to say. The world didn't see me, a daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants, and what it did see, it considered disposable, inconsequential. I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me-bookish and poor and surly and Brown-in the art that I enjoyed. I searched everywhere for a model for the life I wanted, but found few. I wanted to be a writer and travel around the world, but I had no idea how I was going to make that happen. I saw only snippets of that kind of life here and there. Texts like the poetry of Sandra Cisneros were a lifeline. Here was a Mexican girl from Chicago who'd become a writer and traveled alone through Europe. But texts like hers were rare finds for me, because, it seemed, I was the only one in my immediate vicinity looking for them. My teachers didn't often teach books by people of color, and I didn't have mentors or access to the internet, which was rudimentary at that time. The libraries in my community were so limited and hostile toward children that I began stealing books from the bookstore. Today, of course, I know that there were other books out there at the time that spoke to who I was, but they didn't make it into my hands very often. So when no template existed, I did what Lucille Clifton wrote about in her poem "won't you celebrate with me" and made it up."

"A lot of people asked: Why did you start with your vagina? Because I don’t think it’s nasty."

"Poetry is kind of a constant in my life and so that’s something that just won’t ever change because poetry is what allows me to write the prose that I do."

"(“Mexican Daughter” has been banned in a few places. Do you feel if your book has been banned, you’ve actually done something right?) A: I think a lot of people who are upset about these books haven’t read any of them. They’ve just been fed all of these lies that they just perpetuate. I would really like to know, what was it that was so offensive? The mention of abortion, the mention of drugs? I guess people have a problem with that. But I think what people really have a problem with is the title. Because we’re not supposed to take up space. And our stories haven’t been allowed into the mainstream until now and so people are mad that their kids are going to be reading about some ‘hood, Mexican chick in Chicago, It’s so silly to me...It’s very upsetting that they’re so afraid of new ideas and the truth that they hide these texts, hide information to keep this lie going of what the world is."

"I feel that books choose me when they’re ready. I can’t force them into being."

"I mostly find myself writing in Spanglish. I think and feel in both languages."

"I think, for the most part, borders are bullshit. I have trouble accepting the notion that governments have the right to tell people where they can and can’t go. I’m always suspicious of binaries, whether physical or metaphorical."

"A rare one with phosphorescent night-powers & deep-fire mind tools, Erika L. Sánchez"

"Erika’s writing grabs a hold and won’t let go. She’s equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy"

"Erika L. Sánchez writes with persistent care. . . . Reading Sánchez's poems is like watching the world from a train, the exquisite rhythmic blend of the known and the unknown. The world remains always more than we can understand, yet suddenly, thanks to her great poetry, we are pierced by what we know."

"Lessons on Expulsion marks the arrival of a vital new voice in American poetry. With penetrating intelligence and lyrical precision, Erika L. Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her deft braiding of the beautiful and the grotesque infuses her language with a shimmering rawness and a startling immediacy. Her gaze is unflinching and feminist; it marvels and questions and testifies. Lessons on Expulsion is an uncompromising and singular debut."

"(Do you have any advice for aspiring writers of color?) Build community. You won’t get very far without it. You have to support other writers. Read and promote as much as you can. Also, you have to come to terms with rejection. Not everyone is going to love your work, and that’s ok. You just have to keep going. No matter how accomplished you may be, you probably won’t escape it. Write because you love it, not for fame or recognition."

"I relished especially the stories she shares about being a wanderer savoring her solitude, a rare gift for a woman, but absolutely essential for any writer."

"With school access governed by government-drawn maps, families bid up the prices of homes within the coveted zone. As a result, the best schools are almost always located in the areas with the most expensive homes. A home within the zone will often cost $200,000 or more than an equivalent home just outside it. This is the real cost of a supposedly "free" public education."

"Public education in our country has long relied on certain foundational myths. Many—perhaps most—of us have largely accepted these myths as articles of faith. Now, a handful of journalists and activist parents are exposing the often-troubling realities."

"District bureaucrats will insist that these maps are necessary to preserve the neighborhood school. But it’s worth remembering that we all shop at neighborhood grocery stores, and we don’t need exclusionary government maps to do it."

"American public schools were once explicitly Christian and even Protestant. I would argue that, until recently, they were implicitly Christian while also offering a heavy dose of moderate liberalism, the dominant American civil religion of the last century. But as our politics have fractured, this traditional approach to education has given way in many schools. What’s been sucked into the void has differed from place to place: sometimes a reactionary conservatism, and sometimes a radical progressive ideology that seeks to destroy much of what we’ve inherited from prior generations."

"It’s clear that our public education system is not "available to all on equal terms." As a country, we desperately need to repair our social contract. One vital way to do that is to restore the promise of public education as a system of common schools that are truly open to all American children."

"Perhaps, one day, the public school system will launch a counter-reformation to address some of the core problems that have prevented it from fulfilling its noble purpose. But for now, the vested powers of the educational establishment, much like the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, have chosen to take a purely defensive position. Heretics who call for reform are labeled segregationists, book banners, or at the very least, "divisive.""

"So when a charter school is found to be cherry-picking its students, there are consequences. Local ACLU chapters, including Southern California and Arizona, have published reports detailing how charter schools have either broken the law or violated its spirit…But the rest of the public schools are held to a very low legal standard of access and face very little scrutiny of their enrollment practices."

"The public school system is a foundational part of our social contract. But our laws and policies ensure that the most coveted public schools are only accessible to the select few who have the resources to play the game. We have to do better to fulfill Justice Warren’s promise."

"The core belief driving our work is so simple that it might sound radical. Even the best and most coveted public schools should be open and accessible to all families."

"The public schools are not as inclusive as we typically assume them to be, and they often turn children away for arbitrary or discriminatory reasons, violating the foundational promise of common schools that are open to all children."

"Writing in the New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins once suggested that stories by Belloc and others are not appropriate for children and are really meant for the grown-ups. To test his hypothesis, I suggest reading one of these classics aloud to a seven-year-old. In my experience, the child very quickly understands that she’s being told a sophisticated joke, and the butt of the joke is the parent who is constantly urging her toward upright behavior. I want to suggest that Gothic nonsense should be a part of every child’s upbringing."

"Here is the truth: 78% of public school children attend their assigned public school. If American public schools are divided along economic and racial lines (and it’s indisputable that they are), then it is primarily because of school assignment policies, not because a minority of parents look for better public school options for their children."

"How are children assigned to schools? By their address. Our public schools are segregated because of the lines that are drawn, showing who gets into good public schools and who gets kept out. These lines often exclude many middle-class and lower-income families, especially immigrants and minorities."

"Historically, the most coveted public schools in America use government-drawn maps to discriminate against students who live in "less desirable" parts of town."

"[Cautionary verse] is a genre that has receded from view in recent years, but it’s hiding in the shadows, ready to pop out and horrify the stultified masses. Yet it will likely delight anyone who believes that children’s literature should be more than just morality tales dressed up with colorful pictures. Perhaps poems like these can help embolden the humorists of tomorrow. The way things are going, we’re likely to need them."

"We already have a name for this practice of using your address to determine whether or not you are eligible for valuable government services. We call it redlining. Educational redlining is analogous to redlining in the housing market. In each case, valuable government services are reserved for more privileged communities, using geographic preferences as a way to limit who is eligible to receive them."

"By carving up our cities into attendance zones, we are perpetuating the economic and racial divisions that marked one of the darkest eras of our nation’s past."

"Almost 80 percent of public school children attend their assigned public school. If American public schools are divided along economic and racial lines (and it’s indisputable that they are), then it is primarily because of geographic school assignment, not because a minority of parents look to escape the failing schools they’ve been assigned to."

"What is this peculiar, misshapen thing that we call an attendance zone? It’s an administrative service area. Government bureaucrats carve up the map and determine who gets preferred enrollment at what school. There are no elected officials at the attendance-zone level—and no political representation. The residents of a school zone are not subject to special taxes that go to the local school. An attendance zone is also a license to discriminate. If the school is full (most of the best schools are), then the attendance zone provides the school with the ability to exclude families who live within the district’s jurisdictional boundaries but outside of the arbitrary zone for that school as drawn by district staff."

"I want to draw a direct line from the racially discriminatory housing practices of the middle decades of the twentieth century and the laws and policies that create attendance zones for public schools today."

"I started thinking of Huck Finn as a protoypical American myth."

"It’s commonplace for Americans of all races and income levels to use a false address to get into a school that they aren’t zoned for. School districts then sometimes hire private eyes to spy on kids and even put parents in jail for crossing the lines."

"The harder you look at attendance zones, the more they appear to violate fundamental principles. Isn’t public education supposed to be "the Great Equalizer" providing equal opportunity for all children, regardless of race or income level? Aren’t we all supposed to be treated equally under the law?"

"The original Huck Finn is not about slavery; it’s not about race. This is a story about an abused kid looking for a safe haven."

"My wife and I were out doing a kayak trip on the [Los Angeles River] ... It’s a wilder place than you would think from just driving over it on the freeway. I started to think about the idea of the River as this place where you could have an adventure. I started to imagine, ok, what would it be like if Huck Finn were alive today and he were traveling down the River."

"Huck undergoes a change in Twain’s original in terms of how he sees the slave Jim, and Huck undergoes a similar change in this book."

"It was an incredibly fun experience to try an inhabit that voice and try to get into Huck’s head and see Los Angeles from the point-of-view of this naive kid from backwoods Missouri."

"“Borders are a motif in my writing. I was born and raised on the border, and my writing always takes me back there. They say you can take a person out of the border but you can't take the border out of a person. That saying definitely applies to me. Growing up, the border was an invisible line my family and I crossed every day. Because of that, I see borders as porous membranes through which people, animals, goods, services, and the environment must continuously traverse and transmit back and forth.”"

"“If we can acknowledge the failures of the past alongside its squandered potential, we can also remember and apply our insights and learnings to our present. It is a way we can envision becoming a better people, capable as a nation of emerging from the shadows of our own creation to fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all.”"

"“When it comes to borders I see bridges instead of walls. I see beginnings instead of endings. I see an opportunity for people to come together and build something constructively and collaboratively.”"

"“As a native Texan, I was raised on the refrain of remembrance.”"

"“We can’t forget our past. We must be vigilant of history’s injustices and atrocities. No matter what stone we turn, there is a story to be found. Sometimes it lies in plain sight on the surface. Other times it is hidden deep underground. And, more often than not, the architects of a place’s history have used the stone as a foundation upon which they’ve built a museum of illusions, an image of what they would like the truth to be, and how they would choose to see themselves—but also a structure that shadows and obfuscates the truth, leaving millions in the dark about their own proud histories.”"

"“When we understand our histories and we can process the traumas that might have been passed down through the generations, we can better face these issues and also begin to heal as individuals and families. And, if you're a writer or an artist, you might find yourself with a life-changing project on your hands that is both enlightening and empowering.”"

"“In the case of Valley of Shadows, I sort of imagine, could the situation have been different had there been more people of color in positions of power? So it kind of turns the Western on its head by having a Mexican American sheriff be the person that’s trying to solve these crimes and bring justice to his town. … And by doing that, I wanted to create a story where the people that have often been marginalized in the telling of these histories have an opportunity to reclaim their place and their role in history.”"