Dominican-American Authors Who Have Redefined American Literature
According to the Pew Research Center, Dominicans are the 5th largest Latino group in the U.S, totaling 2.1 million in 2017. Many of the authors below have won major awards and who have made tremendous strides in the U.S.
Julia Alvarez is the author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go?). She has been the recipient of the Pura Belpré Award and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, and the the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
Angie Cruz is the author of Dominicana (Flatiron, 2019), Let It Rain Coffee (S & S 2005) and Soledad (Simon & Schuster 2001). She has published short fiction and essays in magazines and journals, including VQR, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, The New York Times and Small Axe..
Juno Diáz is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her. He has been the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.
Elizabeth Acevedo is the author of The Poet X, With the Fire on High, and Clap When You Land. Her novel, The Poet X, won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. She is also the recipient of the Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Fiction, the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award, and the 2019 Pure Belpré Author Award for celebrating, affirming, and portraying Latinx culture and experience.
Jasmine Mendez is the author of Aniana Del Mar Jumps In, Las Habichuelas de Josefina, Night-Blooming Jasminne: Personal Essays & Poetry. She been published both nationally and internationally in literary journals and anthologies including The New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Texas Review, The Rumpus and others. Her children’s book, Josefina’s Habichuelas is forthcoming in 2021.
Rhina Espaillat is the author of And After All (2019); Her Place in These Designs (2008); Playing at Stillness (2005); Rehearsing Absence (2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; a bilingual chapbook titled Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (2001); Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Lapsing to Grace (1992).
Under the pen name Black Artemis, Sofia Quintero wrote Explicit Content, Picture Me Rollin’ and Burn. She is also the author of the novel Divas Don’t Yield and contributed novellas to the “chica lit” anthologies Friday Night Chicas and Names I Call My Sister.
Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, filmmaker, producer, and award-winning writer, Raquel Cepeda is the author of Bird of Paradise: How I became Latina (Atria, Simon & Schuster).
Naima Coster is the author of two novels. Her debut, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Nelly Rosario is the author of the novel Song of the Water Saints, winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Born in the Dominican Republic, she was raised in Brooklyn, New York.
Yesenia Montilla, from New York City, by way of Dominican Republic and Cuba, has earned impressive accolades for her talent as a poet. She is a 2014 Canto Mundo Fellow and a founding member of Poets for Ayiti (Haiti) a collective of poets from diverse backgrounds committed to the power of poetry to transform and educate.
Click on the links below and check out how the following authors have also made great contributions to Dominica-American literature.
