ARCHIVE FOR What an Author Looks Like

Last winter, at a packed open mic in Cambridge, I watched a young girl of Turkish descent stumble on stage. Glancing between the sheets of paper in her shaky hands and the audience, she lost her composure as she recounted a conversation with her father, earlier that day, about her safety as a Muslim. She explained that, yes, she was crying because she no longer felt safe, but mainly it was the pain she registered in her father’s face that made her sad

 

In the Country is Mia Alvar’s debut collection of short stories. Alvar, a Filipina writer, grew up in Bahrain and New York City, and her stories explore what it means to be an immigrant in the Middle East and the U.S., what it is like to come back to the Philippines, and what it means to have never left yet still yearn for the concept of home

Every month for a year, a member of the Grub community will recommend a book they’ve loved by an author of color or another underrepresented author. We hope that by doing this we can contribute in our own small way to broadening the definition of what an author looks like. To find out why, check out our post, What Does an Author Look Like

Every month for a year, a member of the Grub community will recommend a book they’ve loved by an author of color or another underrepresented author. We hope that by doing this we can contribute in our own small way to broadening the definition of what an author looks like. To find out why, check out our post, What Does an Author Look Like? On Race and Writing. In the first of the series, Shuchi Saraswat recommends Aminatta Forna.

At this year’s Muse and the Marketplace conference, we talked about the lack of racial diversity in the publishing industry, and how it shapes our ideas about what an author looks like. Between the manifesto for inclusion set out in the Marketplace Keynote with literary agent Regina Brooks, and Aminatta Forna’s rousing speech about the aesthetic/political dichotomy in art and how it falls across lines of race and national identity, we’ve joined the global conversation on the intersection of race and writing.

 

But is it enough?

 

Recently, in response to a summer reading list from The New …