Palabra Power: 10 Latina Authors You Need to Know

Credit: BELatina/BrandStar

Every few years when you least expect it a new crop of talented Latina authors who’ve dedicated tumultuous years honing their craft and writing in solitude, finally give birth to debut works that begin to slowly get noticed by U.S. readers and thus catch on fire.

Who are some of these essential Latina writers breaking into the national literary landscape at the moment? The following ten writers have demanded that the world take notice of their fierceness on the page. In the descriptions below you’ll see how the zeitgeist in Latina literature is not only centered on identity anymore but in the world of young adult fiction, science fiction, dystopian futures and fantasy settings. There are also unabashed queer stories, erotica scenes, and even one author writing for Marvel comics about a Latina superhero named none other than America.

4Erika L. Sánchez

Erika Sanchez Belatina
Photo Credit IG @erikalsanchez

The much talked about multi-disciplined bard first made her debut in 2017 with Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf, PEN America Open Book Award finalist), a critically acclaimed poetry collection that explores the metaphor of the border and its duality. The book’s power comes from the fact that it’s Sánchez’s autobiographical take about being the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her unabashed poems take on sex, shame, racism, and violence, while bringing to life the pains of sex workers and factory laborers, the greed of narco-traffickers, and the hope of artists and lovers.  Sánchez won a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. And when Sanchez launched her debut young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Penguin Random House, 2017), it became a National Book Award Finalist and an instant New York Times bestseller. It was labeled as a cross between The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and part Jane the Virgin.