About this item
First-generation American LatinX Liliana Cruz does what it takes to fit in at her new nearly all-white school. But when family secrets spill out and racism at school ramps up, she must decide what she believes in and take a stand.Liliana Cruz is a hitting a wall - or rather, walls. There's the wall her mom has put up ever since Liliana's dad left - again. There's the wall that delineates Liliana's diverse inner-city Boston neighborhood from Westburg, the wealthy - and white - suburban high school she's just been accepted into. And there's the wall Liliana creates within herself, because to survive at Westburg, she can't just lighten up, she has to whiten up. So what if she changes her name? So what if she changes the way she talks? So what if she's seeing her neighborhood in a different way? But then light is shed on some hard truths: It isn't that her father doesn't want to come home - he can't .
About the Author
Jennifer De Leon is the winner of the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Brevity, Ms., Briar Cliff Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Best Women's Travel Writing, and elsewhere. She has published author interviews in Granta and Agni, and she has been awarded scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Blue Mountain Center, and the Macondo Writers' Workshop. She was born in the Boston area to Guatemalan parents. After graduating from Connecticut College, she moved to San Jose, California, where she taught elementary school as part of the Teach for America program and earned a master's in teaching from the University of San Francisco's Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice. After moving back to Boston, she designed college access programs and mentored first-generation college students and then earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Currently she teaches at Grub Street and for Boston Public Schools. She is working on a memoir and a novel.
