Angie Cruz

"My name is Cara Romero, and I came to this country because my husband wanted to kill me. Don't look so shocked. You're the one who asked me to say something about myself. (beginning of book)"

"I yelled. But who could hear me? How many people have died this way? (p15)"

"It's always like that: just when I think I don't give a shit about what my family thinks, they find a way to drag me back home. (beginning of book)"

"What are we teaching our daughters or sisters or cousins if we always pretend that we don’t need anybody? The truth is we all need somebody and I wanted to illustrate that too. Like, even if there is strength in doing certain kinds of things the celebration of resilience is also killing us. (2022)"

"I do think reading is an intimate conversation we can have with ourselves and each other. Even if we don’t explicitly say the horrors of our lives out loud, the characters in the books can bridge an understanding that we survived something or a knowing of something, between family members and our communities. (2020)"

"Art is about pushing at the edges, and we’re privileged, however uncomfortable and challenging it may be, to have the opportunity to walk on a tight-rope between multiple lingual, cultural, national, social entities. (2019)"

"Everything is alive around you (in Callaloo Summer 2007)"

"I don't want to write the war in my next novel. I want to imagine peace...Maybe it's in code-switching that we can invent a language for peace. (in Callaloo Summer 2007)"

"I know that I should be free to write any which way I want-tone, story, etc.-because if not, we're lying to ourselves. (in Callaloo Summer 2007)"

"Thinking about it, sometimes I watch the news and say, "¿What kind of world do we live in? ¿Who are these people making these crazy decisions and why are we living in it? ¿And what can we do?" Fiction is one of those last places where the world is bound between these pages, and you can sit with it for a while and imagine humanity in a completely different way. Without all the gloss of image...It's a place to dream and it's a place to look at yourself through the characters; again, it's like the person you are connecting with, it's connecting with the issues that you have within yourself. (in Callaloo Summer 2007)"

"She writes with confidence and compassion. She cleaves through the evasions and silences that obscure so much of what we call the immigrant experience."

"She writes with a rare combination of fierce passion and tender compassion for her unforgettable world."