GrubWrites

(Tonight) Grubbie Debut: Jennifer De Leon with Grace Talusan

Join Porter Square Books and Grubstreet tonight at 7pm (EDT) in the latest installment of the Grubbie Debuts series, featuring longtime GrubStreet student, instructor, and board member Jennifer De Leon for the launch of her debut nonfiction collection, White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, and Writing. Jennifer will be joined in conversation with author and GrubStreet Instructor Grace Talusan. This event is free and open to all, hosted on Crowdcast. Register here.

About White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, and Writing

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.

This free series is in partnership with our friends at Porter Square Books and will be held remotely. When GrubStreet’s new space is ready and when it’s safe for us all to gather again, we’ll look forward to hosting these events in-person on our writers’ stage. In the meantime, register today to reserve your spot and we’ll see you online very soon. Learn more.