White Space: Essays on Culture, Race and Writing

~Co-presented with LatinX in Publishing and The Puente Project~

Author Jennifer De Leon
in conversation with
Mesa Refuge Alum Sara Campos

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 more than 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, her book White Space: Essays on Culture, Race and Writing 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.

Jennifer De Leon is author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From and editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education. She has published prose in over a dozen literary journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and makes her home in the Boston area. (Photo by Alonso Nichols)

Sara Campos is a writer, lawyer and program officer at a private foundation. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including two anthologies: Basta – an Anthology of Latinas and Gender Violence and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. and a number of other journals and newspapers including: Porterhouse Review, Platte Valley Review, Saint Anne’s Review, 580 Split, Colorlines, AlterNet Media, the LA Review of Books, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has also received an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and residencies and fellowships from Las Letras Latinas, VONA, Macondo, Hedgebrook, the Anderson Center, and the Mesa Refuge.

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