Our guest, Erika Sánchez, reads from her masterful debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Sánchez's writing is unflinching in its reckoning with teenage pain, while also somehow making you laugh out loud. This conversation combines the same qualities, returning bravely to humor between ventures into serious terrain like the stigma attached to mental health struggles in the Latinx community, and the dark places a writer needs to go in her own mind to get despair right on the page. Sánchez reflects on a family dynamic recognizable to most of us who were once adolescents: the desire to be seen for who we are and want to be, alongside the failure to imagine the lives of our parents -- and the alienation and tension this can cause, especially for the children of immigrants. For Sánchez, reading can exacerbate the distance we feel from our kin, carrying us to a million other worlds, but it's also an exercise in revolutionary empathy -- with the potential to reconnect us, and more deeply than before.
Author Bio:
Erika Sánchez is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She's the author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a New York Times Bestseller, a National Book Awards finalist, and a soon-to-be film adaptation directed by America Ferrera. Her poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award, and her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, is slated to be published in 2022. She was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, and a recipient of both the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was appointed the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University and is part of the inaugural core faculty of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA Program.
