Dariel Suarez, The Playwright's House & Jennifer de Leon, White Space

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Join authors Dariel Suarez and Jennifer de Leon as they read from and discuss their latest work: The Playwright's House, a novel set in contemporary Cuba which explores the intersection between family, art, and politics, and White Space, an intimate and insightful essay collection about Guatemalan-American identity and navigating spaces between two worlds. 

The Playwright's House, by Dariel Suarez

When a renowned Cuban theater director is arrested under mysterious circumstances, a successful young lawyer and his estranged brother must overcome their family’s tragic past and confront their country’s unforgiving political reality in order to free their father.

Purchase your copy of the book online or call the store to order (505) 988-4226.

About the Author

Dariel Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997. His debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude, received the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. Dariel is an inaugural City of Boston Artist Fellow and Education Director at GrubStreet. His prose has appeared in numerous publications, including the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, and the Caribbean Writer, where he was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. Dariel earned his MFA in Fiction at Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.

White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing by Jennifer de Leon

Juniper Prize for Creative Non-Fiction.

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way.  Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

Purchase your copy of the book online or call the store to order (505) 988-4226

About the Author

Jennifer de Leon is author of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education. De Leon has published prose in over a dozen literary journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and makes her home in the Boston area.