Latinx Writers' Weekend 2023: Keynote Address featuring Angie Cruz

Event Description

GrubStreet is thrilled to welcome award-winning author Angie Cruz for an evening keynote presentation and conversation with Daphne Santana Strassmann.

Angie Cruz’s extraordinary novel Dominicana was inspired by her mother’s story of leaving the Dominican Republic for New York City. In researching the novel, Cruz discovered that there was scant public record of the experiences of working-class Dominican women in New York, and so she started Dominicanas NYC, an Instagram archive of Dominicanas from the 1950s to the 1990s. In her fiction and beyond, Cruz has preserved a multiplicity of experiences, voices, and lives, ensuring stories will be transmitted from one generation to the next. For GrubStreet's inaugural Latinx Writers' Weekend, she will speak on the topic of preserving Latinx voices in our own creative work and communities, with an audience Q&A and book signing to follow.

Virtual viewers can register for the Crowdcast livestream here!

About the Author

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). It was shortlisted by The Aspen Words Literary Prize, winner of the Gold Medal, Latino Book Award/The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Book Award, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize and chosen for The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction. Her novel Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, and the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including the Lighthouse Fellowship, Siena Art Institute, and the Macdowell Arts Colony. She’s published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and other journals. She's the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal Aster(ix) and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York and Turin.

Daphne Santana Strassmann is an essayist and educator. She writes about the intangible spaces between her Latino heritage and American life, and her writing has appeared in Creative NonFiction, GrubWrites, Tex{t}Mex, and several writing textbooks. She founded “Rekindle Your Craft,” a free writing workshop for writers of all levels and genres to explore their connection to storytelling. She is a former student and instructor at GrubStreet and a creative writing professor at MassArt College of Art and Design. Daphne also leads a memoir writing workshop at MIT, where she launched the group’s first publication during the pandemic. Daphne is a proud Macondista with an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction. She recently completed her memoir about finding safety, identity, culture, and language amid the alienation of geographical uprooting. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays, written in Spanglish, titled “Domexican Gringa,” inspired by the ever-present influence of emigration and immigration on her daily life. While Daphne lives in Boston, she still misses every single place in which she’s lived.

About Writers' Weekends

Twice this year, GrubStreet will host Writers' Weekends to celebrate and highlight the work of diverse communities within the writing world. Each Writers' Weekend will feature special events — readings, craft sessions, keynotes, parties, and more — to explore how writing intersects with identity, culture, and society. Our inaugural Latinx Writers' Weekend is taking place June 2-4, and we're thrilled to have a weekend of programming open to the whole community that amplifies and celebrates the voices of Latinx writers.

Event Format

This event will take place in-person at our Center for Creative Writing in Boston's Seaport neighborhood.

Covid-19 Update:

GrubStreet's space will be mask optional when Boston's Covid-19 Community Level is low or medium. When the Covid-19 Community Level is high, our space will require masks. Please check GrubStreet's Covid-19 page for the latest info on masking and Community Levels before visiting in-person.