Palabra Power: 10 Latina Authors You Need to Know

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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.

8Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid Rojas Contreras BeLatina
Photo Credit IG @i_rojascontreras

Her 2018 debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Penguin Random House, paperback May 2019), about a sheltered girl and her teenage maid who strike up a friendship against the backdrop of the continuous violence of 1990s Colombia received so much buzz that she earned nods as an Amazon Best Book of August 2018, a B&N Discover Great New Writers Summer 2018 pick, an Indie Next selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. The critically acclaimed novel ultimately became a national bestseller and Entertainment Weekly called it “simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende.” The Bogotá-born Rojas Contreras, who drew on her own life to chronicle her seven-year-old protagonist’s, does not deal in magical realism, but in raw and distorted examinations of the intimacy of violence in Colombian lives. Contreras is currently working on a memoir about her grandfather, a curandero whose powers are aptly summarized by the book’s title, The Man Who Could Move Clouds.