"Ordinary Girls," which originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, was reprinted in The Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. Read an excerpt in The Kenyon Review Online.
"Girl Hood: On (Not) Finding Yourself in Books" appears in Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press).
"Ghosts"11/2/2015 "Ghosts," which first appeared in The Kenyon Review, received a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses:.
"My Mother and Mercy"9/28/2015 "My Mother and Mercy," originally published in The Sun, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015.
"Ghosts"10/12/2014 "Ghosts," originally published in The Kenyon Review, was named a Notable Story in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.
"Girl Hood: On (not) Finding Yourself in Books," originally published in Her Kind, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2014.
"How Memory is Written and Rewritten"8/30/2014 "How Memory is Written and Rewritten: On Adriana Páramo's My Mother's Funeral," Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2014.
"Reflections, While Sitting in Traffic"5/23/2014 "Reflections, While Sitting in Traffic" TriQuarterly, Summer/Fall 2014.
"December" in Salon12/30/2013 My two-sentence holiday story, "December," appears in Salon, alongside stories by some amazing writers, including Lauren Groff, Owen King, Elliott Holt, and Porochista Khakpour.
When you grow up poor, sometimes books are the only connection you have to the world that exists outside your neighborhood. You begin to imagine that the people in those books matter. You imagine that they are important—maybe even immortal—because someone wrote about them. But you? When you fail to find yourself in books—or people like you, who live in neighborhoods like yours, who look like you and love like you—you begin to question your place in the world. You begin to question if those people who make up your neighborhood and your family are worth writing about, if you are worth writing about. Maybe no one thinks about them or you. Maybe no one sees you.
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© 2023 Jaquira Díaz. All rights reserved.
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