Tag: memoir

Publishing On My Mind

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The end of February finds me with publishing on my mind.

I feel fortunate and excited because my hybrid memoir manuscript WHEN I WAS A BILINGUAL WRITER BIRTHED BY BLACK L.A. found a home with Unsolicited Press. I decided to go the un-agented route due to the difficulties in publishing memoir for those of us who are not celebrities. I submitted to approximately thirty small publishers during a query and submission process that was challenging, but that also grew easier the more I practiced it. By the time I made the twentieth query, I had become a bit of an expert on the query letter.

I described my query process in an essay that was published this month on the Jane Friedman blog. The title of the essay is “How I Navigated My Way to a Memoir Deal from a Small Publisher.” Non-celebrity memoir is the most difficult genre in which to get published, but I was able to secure a deal because I had learned so much from other writers in the writing community. Make sure you read my essay for the details.

Also, regarding publishing, once I secured my contract to publish my memoir, I realized there was a bit of a vacuum in my writing history. The title of my memoir refers to my bilingual poetry, but in reality, I’d only published three of my bilingual and multilingual poems back in 1991 in Americas Review published by Arte Publico Press. The rest of my poems I’d guarded in file folders for years.

So, I’m currently in the process of self-publishing those poems now. It’s actually a fun and exciting process because I get to edit my poetic voice from over thirty years ago. And the process of finding a book cover artist and helping to design the cover has been awesome!


With this message, I hope to communicate the importance of never giving up. Don’t give up if you have to submit to over thirty publishers. And don’t give up if it seems daunting to publish writing from over thirty years ago. Positive persistence makes us human! And it’s contagious.

Book Readings in the Los Angeles Area

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Looking back on my past two months attending book readings in Los Angeles, I’m inspired and energized by the manner in which these gatherings create community!

Connecting on social media is great, but real life is so much better. In-real-life events allow us to detect nuances we just can’t perceive when we interact digitally. And the connections we make are more authentic and lasting.

I found and/or rediscovered literary spaces where I feel at home. And I even became a member of Women Who Submit!

So which events did I attend?

At Skylight Books in the Hollywood area, I heard Michelle Gurule talk about her new memoir on sugaring titled Thank You, John. Brandon Taylor engaged in conversation about his novel Minor Black Figures which portrays a NYC painter pondering life and art.  And Myriam Gurba read from her hybrid memoir about plants and memory titled Poppy State and then passed out seeds to members of the audience.

On the westside at Beyond Baroque, poet and author Kevin Young read from two books — A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025, edited by himself, and Night Watch, his newest book.

In East LA at Espacio 1839, editor Romeo Guzman accompanied Jenise Miller, Elaine Lewinnek, and Peter Chesney as they read from their essays in the anthology Writing the Golden State while George Sanchez-Tello performed and read as well.

Toni Ann Johnson read from her short story collection But Where’s Home? at a Women Who Submit event in Highland Park.

And never to be outdone, Reparations Club in South LA hosted Michaela Angela Davis as she engaged in conversation with Authur Jafa about her memoir tenderheaded.

I closed off this sprint of events in Santa Monica by attending the PEN America Emerging Voices LA Workshop reading. It was thrilling to hear participants read from their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and to reflect on my experience as a PEN honoree and participant last year. 

I can’t wait to see what the new year brings in readings and lit events!

Why Samuel Beckett: A Black Writer’s Perspective

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Studying Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during junior year at UCLA was the final straw that pushed me towards mental and emotional exhaustion. I had overextended myself academically by taking too many classes during spring and summer quarters; and, studying Beckett in the fall led to questioning my Catholic faith and having to take a quarter off from my studies.

When I heard that OR books was publishing a hybrid memoir titled Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey, I rushed to pre-order it. Coffey’s memoir, published in July this year, offered a sense of relief because I had worried that the allusions to a modernist writer in my memoir manuscript might seem a bit dated. But here was a memoir published in 2024 proving me wrong.

Unlike Coffey’s book, there are no continuous references to Beckett in my manuscript. Studying Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is pivotal to the inciting incident in chapter one because it causes me to doubt my faith. In Beckett’s Children, on the other hand, the author’s inciting incident centers around the idea that the Irish author may have fathered the American poet, Susan Howe.

Threads running through Coffey’s hybrid memoir include the stated curiosity about a familial bond between Beckett and Howe, Coffey’s literary research on the two writers, his own history as an adoptee, and his relationship with his son who is a three-time felon and addict.  In my manuscript, I weave in the history of Black Los Angeles beginning with the founding of the city by the Spanish.

Coffey’s description of airports and prisons as structures distinguished by their “architecture of waiting” stood out to me. This description was impactful because I’m familiar with Professor David Harvey’s description of the revolutionary potential of airport workers who are a class in themselves with the potential of becoming a class for themselves. In contrast, prisoners are the most captive humans on US soil; and prison is where the US Government has sent revolutionaries, such as members of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. So, I found the analogy of prisons and airports interesting because the two structures can also be considered exact opposites.

I recommend Beckett’s Children because one or more of the four narrative lines the author weaves into his hybrid memoir will grab your interest and pull you through the author’s skillful storytelling until the last page.