As promised in yesterday’s post, today’s guest is the amazing Natalia Sylvester, whose YA debut RUNNING is coming from Clarion Books/HMH in July! Natalia’s adult novels are beautifully written, smart stories of family bonds and individual longing strained and smothered by outside forces. So I can’t wait to see what she does with the story of a Cuban American teenager forced to privately and publicly reckon with her father’s politics, and her own, when her senator father runs for President.

Born In Lima, Peru, Natalia Sylvester came to the U.S. at age four and grew up in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley In Texas. She received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami and now works as a freelance writer in Texas. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina magazine, McSweeney's Publishing, and the Austin American-Statesman.

Natalia’s first novel, CHASING THE SUN, was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad. Her latest novel, EVERYONE KNOWS YOU GO HOME, won an International Latino Book Award, the 2018 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2018 by Real Simple magazine.

Her #read99women recommendation is THE AFFAIRS OF THE FALCÓNS by Melissa Rivero. “It's the story of a Peruvian family living in 1990s New York as undocumented immigrants. Ana, along with her husband and two young children, wants nothing more than a happy, stable life full of opportunities for her family, but no matter how hard she works and how much she sacrifices, things keep getting harder instead of the ‘better’ that the American Dream promises. This is a book about being forced to make decisions in the face of unthinkable options. It's about the power of a mother's sacrifices. What has stayed with me most since I first read it is the compassion and complexity with which Melissa Rivero renders her characters—even and especially when they're imperfect and fallible women. The language is stunning, striking so deeply into the heart of things, that I can still vividly remember and re-experience how I felt reading certain passages. I also highly recommend listening to this book if you're an audio book lover. It's narrated by Frankie Corzo, whose voice is a beautiful balance of strong and tender, just like Ana Falcón.”