Publisher's Weekly - Miami Book Fair Supplement by Miami Book Fair

Miami Book Fair WHAT TO DO, SEE & READ

2018

PETE SOUZA TROLLS TRUMP CELESTE NG TURNS UP THE HEAT AND MORE!

Justice Sotomayor Shares Her Beloved World

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events YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS! SATURDAY, NOVEMBER

Magic, Mayhem, and Misadventures: Page-Turning Quests 3:00-3:50 PM, LIVE Arts Lab (Building 1, 1st Floor)

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Contents The Miami Book Fair takes place November 11-18 at Miami Dade College. There are hundreds of events, from readings in English and Spanish to music, street performances, and more. We talked with a handful of the authors appearing at this year’s fair. Start here, and brace yourself for a literary adventure.

14 A WESTERN WITHOUT COWBOYS

Hernán Diaz upends the old-school western

16 MANY STORIES

Celeste Ng explains what she meant in her essay “Why I Don’t Want to Be the Next Amy Tan”

4 CASTING A WIDE NET

We talk with Lissette Mendez, director of programs for the fair, to find out how it all comes together

6 OBAMA’S PHOTOGRAPHER THROWS SHADE AT TRUMP

Pete Souza’s Instagram habit turned into his new book, Shade

8 THE LANGUAGE WARRIOR Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o believes in the power of art

10 AGAINST ERASURE

Alexander Chee takes off his novelist’s mask

12 AUTHOR & BOOKSELLER

18 DIGGING UP THE PAST Michael Ondaatje explores the aftermath of WWII in Warlight

20 SPANISH-LANGUAGE LITERATURE AT THE FAIR

Here are our picks for the mustsee events

22 SONYA SOTOMAYOR SHARES HER LIFE WITH YOUNG READERS

The Supreme Court justice talks about her two new books

24 SELF-SEARCHER

Pablo Cartaya explores his roots

26 INTO THE DARKDEEP

Lillian Li understands what makes a great bookstore reading

Friends and collaborators Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs venture into the unknown

13 THE (SUPER)HEROICS OF NATION BUILDING

28 READING = HOPE × CHANGE

Wayétu Moore reimagines her homeland

Jacqueline Woodson is on a mission to spread hope through books

30 HANGING OUT IN SPACE Molly Brooks introduces two best friends who live beyond Earth’s atmosphere

Special Events at the Fair Some of the biggest authors appearing at the fair are featured in these ticketed events beginning at 5 p.m. or later. All events are held in Chapman Auditorium, Building 3, floor 1. Visit miamibookfair.com for ticketing information. A Conversation with Tina Brown Sunday, November 11, 5 p.m. The legendary editor talks about her career and her recent book, The Vanity Fair Diaries A Conversation with Liane Moriarty Sunday, November 11, 7 p.m. Hear from the author whose novel became HBO’s Big Little Lies An Evening with Anna Quindlen Monday, November 12, 6 p.m. The bestselling novelist and journalist reads from her new work of fiction, Alternate Side An Evening with Tayari Jones Tuesday, November 13, 8 p.m. Hear Jones read from her recent An American Marriage, which is taking taking the world by storm An Evening with April Ryan Thursday, November 15, 8 p.m. Journalist Ryan shares her new book, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House An Evening National Book Awards Nominees and Winners Friday, November 16, 6 p.m. The honorees for 2018 take a trip to Miami right after the N.Y. awards ceremony

Editorial Director Jim Milliot Associate Publisher Joe Murray Editor Craig Teicher Managing Editor Daniel Berchenko Art Director Lisa M. Kelsey Copy Editor Penelope Cray Contributing Writers Matia Burnett, Dianna Dilworth, Elyssa East, Gabe Habash, Claire Kirch, Lillian Li, Sarah J. Robbins, Matt Seidel, and Leigh Anne Williams Production Manager Michele Piscitelli Sales Coordinator Deena Ali Published by Publishers Weekly Cover: Illustration by Jacob Thomas

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Casting a Wide Net

We spoke with Lissette Mendez, Miami Book Fair director of programs, to find out how she and her team create this sprawling celebration of books and culture by Craig Teicher

W What was on your mind this year when curating the fair?

Making sure that we were casting a wide enough net across the genres. We also want to make sure we reflect the diversity of interests and viewpoints in our community. We have a very comprehensive program featuring comics and graphic novels,

we have a poetry program in addition to a full program of authors from Latin America and Spain who present their books in Spanish, and we have another program of writers from the Caribbean who present in French and/or Haitian Creole. In the end, our selection committee looks at the writing—is the book good? Why? What is important about this topic or issue? The book fair is the work of a small team, but we are very dedicated and are extremely lucky to be part of an educational institution with an open door policy: Miami Dade College is nicknamed Democracy’s College, and that ethos of open access for all has really informed how the fair evolved and continues to evolve. How did this year’s political and public climate inform the events you planned?

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{q&a} We want to be very fair, to have a multiplicity of voices. There are discussions of immigration, and there are panels on Syria, on the civil rights movement and economic justice, on feminism and its pros and cons, on economic realities for families in the U.S., and on the political parties and how the lines are being drawn and why. There’s a panel discussing athletes and activism. Race is a topic we consider in several panels. Our nonfiction and current events programming is varied and represents many of our fellow Americans’ preoccupations The fair is new every year because the books are new, and the performers in our music and children’s areas are different every year. We have upped the number of fun, roving performers who people walking the street fair can interact with— some will be music-based, some theatrical. I love to see the liveliness of the streets during the festival weekend. We are also adding “fringe” events—we started with Literary Death Match some years back, and we’ve introduced Drunk Education, and this year we are bringing the Sob Sisters, House of Speak Easy and Geek Girl Brunch. We have an outdoor hangout area called “the Porch” with a stage where we schedule live music and literary events that can be a little bit more irreverent— more twists on tradition. We also screen films and present dancers and other kinds of performances. This area features lots of hands-on fun: you can get a Poetic License, request a poem on demand from a local poet with a typewriter, take part in writing an Exquisite Corpse poem alongside other fairgoers, borrow wireless headphones to listen to poetry playlists curated by the National Poetry Foundation, play board games, or take a mini writing workshop. How do the English- and Spanishlanguage programs interact?

There are several authors each year who might be crossing over, with their books being published in English, so they might present twice—once in English and once in Spanish. And there are icons who will bring both audiences together, such as Sandra Cisneros or Laura Esquivel, who are part of this year’s program. Their sessions will be simultaneously translated into English.

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NOVEMBER 2018 IN PRINT AND DIGITAL WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

Obama’s Photographer Throws Shade at

Trump Since Trump’s inauguration, Pete Souza has been trolling the president on Instagram by Dianna Dilworth

P A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

Photojournalist and former White House photographer Pete Souza has spent his career documenting presidents from behind a camera. Cutting his teeth as a White House staff photographer under Ronald Reagan, Souza also snapped photos of politicians for several news outlets, including for the Chicago Tribune, during Barack Obama’s term as Illinois senator. During Obama’s presidency, Souza served as chief official White House photographer, in which capacity he had full access to the leader of the free world. In Shade, Souza shares his postTrump journey. What started as some snarky Instagram posts snowballed into a thoughtful photo-essay rich with social commentary. Souza responds to Trump news and tweets using photos from Obama’s presidency, juxtaposing how each president handled the job.

Why did you decide to respond to Trump through images?

A couple of days after the inauguration, I saw a picture of the redecorated Oval Office with those ornate gold curtains. It looked like a Saudi palace. I posted a picture of President Obama seated at the desk with the red curtains in the background. I said I kind of like these curtains better. I was directly responding to the new curtains, but I was also slyly trying to make a point. How did your Instagram habit become a book?

I felt strongly that Trump was demeaning the office of the presidency. One day I sent an email to my book agent and I said, “I want to go all in on this. Let’s propose a book.”

{ nonfiction }

In your opinion, how is Trump demeaning the job?

The fact that he accused President Obama of tapping his phones on social media. He accused the former president of a felony on Twitter. It is like going into a movie theater and yelling fire. There are certain things that shouldn’t be allowed. And just the way he has tweeted about the institutions of our democracy, calling the press the enemy of the people, calling our intelligence agencies liars, and telling the justice department what to do in terms of investigations. From the Book “‘I watched this guy’—pointing to President Obama, seated across from me—’every week in the Situation Room, asking thoughtful questions, listening to advice, making tough but well-informed decisions on really important issues. But this other guy,’ I said, glancing out the window to where the new president had watched us depart, ‘is not capable of that.’”

“I’m a humoristactivist. I’ve gotten less subtle as time has gone on.” With President Obama, I had already known him for four years before he was president. He is a couple of years younger than me and I knew how the White House worked. And the whole aspect of social media had changed things, not in terms of the kind of pictures I took but in terms of what the White House did with the photos, which was make a lot of them public. How has your role transformed from documentarian to activist?

I’m a humorist-activist. I’ve gotten less subtle as time has gone on. With this book, I bring a little humor to the critique of the current administration. I think it is done much more respectfully than the way the current president uses his Twitter feed.

How does the Instagram account differ from the book?

On Instagram, I am responding with a photo and a comment that is somewhat snarky or humorous, but I am not telling people what I am responding to. In the book, I lay it all out; I say, here is the tweet or news story that really bothered me. When you photographed President Obama, was he conscious of being documented?

For anyone, having a guy following you around all day taking pictures takes some getting used to. I had this knack of being around and not really causing a nuisance. I am just like part of the furniture. How were the experiences of working with Reagan and with Obama different?

AN EVENING WITH PETE SOUZA Wednesday, November 14, 6 p.m. Chapman Conference Center Building 3, 2nd Floor, Room 3210

The times were different; there was no such thing as social media. CNN was new.

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NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

He believes in the power of art by Elyssa East

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o was imprisoned at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison without trial in 1978 for one of his plays. Earlier this year, the 80-year-old Ngũgĩ, many times a favorite for the Nobel Prize, published Wrestling with the Devil, a revised U.S. version of his 1982 memoir about his imprisonment. The book is “a drama of resistance as a means of survival,” says Ngũgĩ. His life and art are a testament to the broader origins of the word “resistance” as “the impulse,” Ngũgĩ writes, “to say and act no to evil.” Ngũgĩ ’s locates this impulse among Kenya’s peasants and their native languages. Born in 1938 in the village of Kamĩrĩthũ, Ngũgĩ grew up tenant farming. The lands he tended as a child, owned by white and elite African landlords, had been stolen from his people in the 1920s. Ngũgĩ learned Gĩkũyũ, his

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native language, through stories that he and other children shared while working the fields. Then came colonial school where anyone caught speaking Gĩkũyũ was forced to wear a sign with the words “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Turning to his mother tongue while in prison was the ultimate rebellion. Ngaahika ndeenda, coauthored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, and the cause of his imprisonment, was the first play written in Gĩkũyũ. Its story of a farmer’s land being stolen out from under him postindependence with the aid of the Christian church was a sharp rebuke of the country’s first president Jomo Kenyatta and the KANU government. In Kamĩrĩthũ, where peasants and workers now lived in shacks, an outdoor theater was built. The authors, who also starred in the show, spent months perfecting the play. The performances opened in September 1977 and were an immediate success. The people of Kamĩrĩthũ, Ngũgĩ writes, rediscovered “their collective strength.” In December,

From the Book “Here I have no name. I am just a number in a file: K6,77. A tiny iron frame against one wall serves as a bed. A tiny board against another wall serves as a desk. These fill up the minute cell.”

the authoritarian KANU government shut down the play. On December 30, Vice President Daniel arap Moi imprisoned its authors. Nonetheless, in the memoir, Ngũgĩ describes the six months during which Ngaahika ndeenda was perfected and performed as “the most exciting in my life and the true beginning of my education.” The experience, he says, set him on a lifelong mission: “I have become a language warrior on behalf of all marginalized languages of the world.” AN EVENING WITH NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O Monday, November 12, 8 p.m. Chapman Conference Center, Building 3, 2nd Floor

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

The Language Warrior

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{ nonfiction }

Against Erasure ALEXANDER CHEE

In his first collection of essays, the acclaimed novelist looks into the kaleidoscope of his own identity by Elyssa East

Alexander Chee is the author of the award-winning Edinburgh, an autobiographical novel about sexual abuse at the hands of a choirmaster. He recently stepped out from behind his novelist’s mask. In his first book of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, he looks, through many lenses, at his art and his identity as a gay, Korean-American writer. “A number of these historical events that I tried to write about, which took place in the 1990s, really just before we had the internet, are still weirdly submerged in the culture,” Chee says about the protests he helped orchestrate with ACT UP and Queer Nation, detailed in the essays “1989” and “After Peter.”

During the AIDS crisis, if a news outlet failed to cover a protest, “it was as if it hadn’t happened,” he continues. At that time, with fellow activists, he says he “started thinking about the ways we could create protests that could survive that media eraser.” In 1991, he moved to New York City and took a job cataloguing the stock of a mail-order gay and lesbian bookstore, which, he writes in the essay “My Parade,” amounted to “a catalogue of the kinds of gay writing that had succeeded and failed—what the culture allowed and what it did not.” About famous gay writers (such as James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal), Chee

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From the Book 78. It is like the language the explorer must learn even to ask the question. 79. What is it you want from me? the novel asks. —from the essay “100 Things About Writing a Novel”

in part, to restore to collective memory. Having recently created, with Christine Lee, the Lambda Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship, in honor of the gay Malaysian-American poet who died in 2016, Chee’s activism is ongoing. “I want these other young writers to act,” Chee says. “To do more, to write more, to create more work about us.”

ALEXANDER CHEE IN CONVERSATION WITH GARNETTE CADOGAN Saturday, November 17, 11:00 a.m. Building 8, 2nd Floor, Room 8202

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

writes, “How had they managed to survive against whatever it was that had erased so many others?” Erasure is more than a literary question for Chee. Two of his creative heroes, artist David Wojnarowicz and filmmaker Derek Jarman, were publicly dying from AIDS in the summer of 1991 and were “facing another, new kind of erasure in the process,” that of government inaction around the crisis. “I was born out of it,” Chee says about this era of protest and its undeniable urgency, which How to Write an Autobiographical Novel helps,

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LILLIAN LI

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Li’s insightful debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, takes readers behind the scenes of the Beijing Duck House as two brothers have a running argument about the direction of their restaurant after the death of their father. Li, also a bookseller at Ann Arbor, Mich.’s Literati bookstore, discusses bookstores, authors, and how important readings are to literary culture.

As a bookseller, I have met a fair number of authors on tour, enough to start noticing a strange pattern of behavior. Nine times out of ten, a few minutes before their event, the author will approach the register with a slightly dazed look and a note of apology in their voice. “I’m the author?” they will say. Even the authors who have packed the

space half an hour before the event starts, authors with more books than I have fingers, authors who have hit the bestseller lists, tend to act as if they are trespassing on their own event. Why the shyness? I wondered. You’re the author! But when it became my turn to be the author on tour, I began to understand how a statement of identity could become a question. “I’m the author?” I’ve begun to realize, is a question not of identity but of good fortune. It also isn’t the full question, which goes something like this: “I’m the author you have chosen to host in this beautiful place devoted to words and stories? Me?” This isn’t false modesty or stage fright. Rather, the timidity of entering a bookstore is the understanding that we the authors are the honored ones. To enter a space with so many books, representing so many authors, a space that can connect an entire community with your work, is to feel a sense of awe and undeserving. FAMILY STORIES: READINGS FROM NEW FICTION Sunday, November 18, 1:30 p.m. Building 8, 2nd Floor, Room 8201

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{ fiction }

The (Super) heroics of Nation Building Moore reimagines her homeland in her debut novel by Matt Seidel

Wayétu Moore’s family fled Liberia during the country’s civil war when she was five years old. “My mother, who was in the U.S. at the time, arranged for a network of rebel female soldiers to essentially traffic us out,” Moore says. Her family eventually settled in a suburb outside of Houston. Ranging across a Virginia plantation,

Jamaica, and Liberia, She Would Be King follows three characters, each of whom is blessed with a supernatural gift, whose paths converge in the burgeoning republic. “Liberia was this beautiful experiment about what would happen if you brought people together from Africa and the Caribbean and America,” Moore says. “I barely heard about Liberia outside of my parents’ efforts, and that absence was resounding. When I realized I wanted to start writing, Liberia was the first place I went to artistically.”

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

WAYÉTU MOORE

HISTORICAL NOVELS TODAY: A READING WITH HERNÁN DIAZ AND TATJANA SOLI Saturday, November 17, 3:30 p.m. Building 8, 2nd Floor, Room 8201

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A Western Without Cowboys

Diaz reinvents a genre by Gabe Habash

Hernán Diaz, born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, upends the old-school western in his Pulitzer Prize–finalist In the Distance. This book is an immigrant story, a historical novel sort of removed from time and place, and a fascinating deconstruction of the western. What about these elements intrigued you?

I found the kernel for this novel many years ago, when I first moved to London. By chance, I read several books about solitary characters in deserted settings. Perhaps because I was so utterly aware

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November 11-18, 2018 / MIAMI, FLORIDA

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POETRY, FICTION & NONFICTION FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD / STREET FAIR / PUBLISHERS & BOOKSELLERS / CHILDREN’S AUTHORS & ACTIVITIES

{ fiction }

From the Book

“A pair of hands came out of the water and groped for the edges of the angular hole.” during the great push west; the story is a Western without cowboys. I thought it was important to quite literally alienate the genre in order to question the ossified political assumptions at its core. of my own foreignness, I started asking myself if there was anything specific about those different wastelands. What distinguishes one void from another? I found interesting contradictions. The larger the desert, for instance, the more intense the feeling of claustrophobia. Once I decided to set my story in America, I intentionally exacerbated these paradoxes—my character travels east

During much of the novel, Håkan is alone in remote parts of the West. Having a character by himself can be very difficult to pull off. How did you make these scenes so compelling?

This was one of the greatest challenges of the book. I adhered fanatically to Håkan’s point of view but didn’t allow myself to pry too much into his mind. Rather than focusing on his “interiority,”

I was concerned with his body—how it met the world through its senses, how it was dwarfed by its surroundings, how it inhabited time. Sometimes I even thought of Håkan as a gentle animal. What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

For ideological reasons, I found the few bursts of violence in the book very hard to write, and this is why they are so short. Then, late in the book, Håkan flees the world and is swallowed by the earth—he digs a burrow and spends years in a network of tunnels. This was always the gravitational center of the novel to me, a drain sucking in everything, from his sense of selfhood to time itself. It was very difficult to write this black hole.

HISTORICAL FICTION: A CONVERSATION Saturday, November 17, 1:30 p.m. Building 8, 2nd Floor, Room 8203

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{ fiction }

Many Stories

Celeste Ng published her essay “Why I Don’t Want to Be the Next Amy Tan” before Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You made her a literary celebrity. It’s not a criticism of Tan, whose writing Ng admires, but of how Tan and other Chinese-American authors have been received. “Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we’re all telling the same story, ” Ng writes. “Worst of all, such comparisons place undue weight on the writer’s ethnicity, suggesting that writers like Tan, Chang, and Kingston are telling first and foremost A Story About Being Chinese, not stories about families, love, loss, or universal human experience.”

China, Ng moved with her family to Shaker Heights when she was 10. She was unaware of Shaker Heights’ deliberate exceptionalism. Uncut lawns are fined, there is no such thing as unsightly curbside trash pickup, and the pro-integration housing policies were implemented before the end of segregation. In Little Fires Everywhere, Ng’s character Lexie Richardson says, “I mean we’re lucky. No one sees race here.” “Everyone sees race, Lex,” Lexie’s brother Moody replies. “The only difference is who pretends not to.” When asked about the distinction between being seen and being visible, Ng says, “It’s a double-edged sword: on the one hand, being seen is so necessary and validating—those of us who haven’t had much representation know how important it is to see yourself on the page or on the screen. At the same time, being highly visible also has its downsides. Sometimes,

From the Book “By the time the fire was put out the house had not, despite Mrs. Richardson’s fears, quite burned to the ground.”

Now, says Ng,“I write about issues of race and privilege and identity because I care deeply about them and because they affect my own life daily. I truly believe that most of our conflicts come from a lack of empathy, so I try to extend that both to my characters and to other people.” Little Fires Everywhere tells the story of a white American family in the progressive, bourgeois utopia of Shaker Heights, Ohio. Life there is upended when a single mother and her daughter come to town and the custody battle for an adopted Chinese-American baby divides the community. Born in Pittsburg in 1980 to scientist parents who had emigrated from

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when you’re seen prominently, you inadvertently end up blocking out other people and held up as the representative of your group. I don’t speak for all Asians, or all Asian-American women, or all Chinese-American women, or all women—because there are many stories within those groups. Other people need to be seen, too, so I try to spread the spotlight where I can.”

READINGS FROM NEW NOVELS WITH LAURA VAN DEN BERG Sunday, November 18, 4 p.m. Auditorium, Building 1, 2nd Floor, Room 1261

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

CELESTE NG

Ng explains her fiction and what she meant in her essay “Why I Don’t Want to Be the Next Amy Tan” by Elyssa East

A New York Confidential novel

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MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Digs Up the Past

where his mother went, as well as why she left, drive much of the novel. Warlight is also a bildungsroman, following Nathaniel as he begins to explore the world beyond his family. A new sort of family takes shape in the house, ushering Nathaniel into youthful adventures, including a job smuggling illegal racing greyhounds. An abrupt and surprising shift to Nathaniel’s adult life occurs in the second half of the novel, when Rose reappears, and Nathaniel

From the Book “They had rarely spoken to us about their lives. We were used to partial stories. Our father had been involved in the last stages of the earlier war, and I don’t think he felt he really belonged to us.”

curfews during the war, when lights had to be dimmed to hide the city’s features from German bombers. It is 14-year-old Nathaniel Williams who opens Warlight as he describes his parents leaving him and his sister, Rachel, who is nearly 16. Nathaniel’s parents say they’re going to Singapore, where his father has accepted a new job. Separations of that kind weren’t unusual in wartime, Ondaatje says. Later Nathaniel leanrs that his mother, Rose, didn’t go to Singapore. Nathaniel’s efforts to solve the mystery of

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learns that what took her away was dangerous work for British intelligence. The affairs of the world and political intrigue rush into the story when Rose reappears. She had been a radio operator during the war, and later she intercepted, altered, and re-sent German signals. The war is officially over when this story begins, but, Ondaatje says, “no wars end punctually.” MICHAEL ONDAATJE ON WARLIGHT: A READING Saturday, November 17, 11:30 a.m. Auditorium, Building 1, 2nd Floor, Room 1261

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

“In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” This is how Michael Ondaatje opens Warlight. He compares his writing method to archeology, usually beginning with a fragment or an image, like the sentence above, that he uses to slowly uncover the story. “It seems ridiculous and a bit like a kind of fairy tale,” Ondaatje says. I wasn’t setting out to write a war novel or a postwar novel; that became the landscape.” In fact, Ondaatje says, “I really begin a book not knowing what it was going to be about, but that’s the way I’ve worked in the past.” That past includes his best-known work, the 1992 novel The English Patient, which won the Man Booker Prize, as well as six other novels and 15 books of poetry. After his initial idea for the story took hold, he says, the city of London materialized as he focused on what it must have been like there after WWII. The title comes from the time of blackouts and

In his new novel, Warlight, Ondaatje explores the aftermath of WWII in London through the story of an abandoned brother and sister by Leigh Anne Williams

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Spanish-Language Literature at the Miami Book Fair Our picks for the essential events by Marcela Valdes & Craig Teicher The Miami Book Fair offers so many irresistible events for Spanish-language readers that the main problem is how to choose among all the coming-of-age novels, political reckonings, social satires, literary experiments, and revived classics.

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Boris Izaguirre presenta su nueva novela 7 p.m. Building 3, 2nd Floor, Room 3209 n Andrés Oppenheimer, ¡Sálvese Quien Pueda! El Futuro Del Trabajo En La Era De La Automatización

Argentine journalist Oppenheimer (Miami Herald, CNN Español) warns that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will soon affect the lives of doctors, lawyers, bankers, salespeople, and teachers in the same way that automation has already transformed factory work.

Friday, November 16 n Boris Izaguirre, Tiempo de Tormentas

So far, the press about Izaguirre’s autobiographical novel has focused on his frank account of the rapes he suffered at age 13, but the true heart of his book is its portrait of his courageous, pioneering mother, a ballerina in Caracas, Venezuela, who

recognized her son’s homosexuality early on and nurtured the panache that Izaguirre later deployed in Spain as a TV showman.

Encuentro con Andrés Oppenheimer 8 p.m. Building 2, 1st Floor, Room 2106

Saturday, November 17 n VI Seminario de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil This sixth

edition of the Seminar of Literature for Kids and Young Adults is co-organized by the Miami Book Fair and Fundación Cuatrogatos.

Prominent IberoAmerican authors, editors, and scholars discuss trends, news, and challenges. “Más libros, más libres,” organizado por la Fundación Cuatrogatos y la Feria del Libro de Miami 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Building 7, 1st Floor, Room 7106 n Francisco Larios, Sobre La Vida Breve De Cualquier Paraíso

Translator Larios, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua in the 1980s, considers the effects of power, illusion, and exile in his fifth book of poems. El aliento de la poesía 1 p.m. Building 8, 5th Floor, Room 8525 n Pilar Quintana, La Perra Quintana’s

intense short novel— winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana—traces the maternal tenderness, and the maternal fury, of a middle-aged woman who adopts a puppy and names it after the child she never had. Distintos senderos de la narración 2 p.m. Building 8, 5th Floor, Room 8503 n Jorge Volpi, Una Novela Criminal

Mexican novelist Volpi won the Alfaguara Prize for this deeply

researched “nonfiction novel” about the case of Florence Cassez, a French woman charged with kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years in prison after Mexican police staged her arrest for TV. Her case remains a controversial symbol of corruption in Mexico’s judiciary system. Encuentro con Jorge Volpi, Premio Alfaguara de Novela 2018 3:30 p.m. Building 8, 5th Floor, Room 8503

Sunday, November 18 n Ana María Shua, Todos Los Universos Posibles Argentine

writer Shua has been a master of micro fiction since the 1970s. This volume of her collected works should delight newcomers to her ministories as well as longtime fans. Por los territorios de la ficción 1:15 p.m. Building 8, 5th Floor, Room 8525 n Renato Cisneros, Dejarás La Tierra

Peruvian novelist Cisneros presents part two of his acclaimed family saga, spotlightin his great-grandmother, a matriarch who conceived seven children with a priest during the early years of Peru’s independence. Narraciones para estos tiempos 1:30 p.m.

Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 8303 n Horacio Castellanos Moya, Moronga The

consequences of El Salvador’s brutal civil war surface in a college town in Wisconsin in this novel about two immigrants, one of whom is investigating the murder of a great revolutionary poet.

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Exploraciones de la palabra 3 p.m. Building 8, 5th Floor, Room 8503

n Sandra Cisneros, La Casa En Mango Street

Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos interviews legendary Chicana writer Cisneros about her work and about the new Mexican edition of her Chicago comingof-age novel, which became an instant classic when it was first published in 1984. This session will be held in Spanish with translation into English. Sandra Cisneros conversa sobre su obra con Jorge Ramos 6 p.m. Building 1, Auditorium, 2nd Floor, Room 1261

A note from Mariela Gal, IberoAmerican Author Program manager for the Miami Book Fair: We are extremely proud to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Miami Book Fair and to witness the continuous growth of the IberoAmerican Author Program along the years. We feel that in a cosmopolitan, multicultural community like Miami, there is a great need for a diversity of authors and genres to satisfy the different tastes and preferences of the public. Internationality is a unique feature of the IberoAmerican Author Program. This year, we are welcoming writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Venezuela. From emerging authors to renowned bestselling novelists, from poets and essayists to writers of micro stories, there is always something for everybody to enjoy and discover.

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Sonia Sotomayor

Shares Her Life With Young Readers

Two new books recall her journey BY SARAH J. ROBBINS

For Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, sometimes it’s all about kids and books. She has just released two new books for young readers: one, The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor, is a middle grade adaptation of her bestselling adult memoir, My Beloved World (2013); the other, Turning Pages, is a picture book version of Sotomayor’s life, illustrated by Lulu Delacre. We caught up with Justice Sotomayor while she was traveling down the East Coast on her book tour. Why did you decide that you wanted to share your story with younger readers?

My Beloved World was stimulated by a lot of questions kids were already asking me: “What was it like to lose a parent when you were young?” “What was it like having a condition like diabetes?” “Was it scary?” Once children see you in a position of power, a lot of them who are facing their own challenges ask: “Have you ever been afraid?” “Can you ever succeed if you fail?” My cousin Miriam is a middle school bilingual education teacher in Stamford,

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Conn.; she used my adult book in her class, but she told me that many pieces in it—a lot of the law things—were a little bit over the students’ heads. The middle grade book was a natural follow-up; we tried to retain those aspects of my life that were responses to the kids’ questions. Since we knew it would be impossible for the youngest readers to understand the adult book, no matter how much I simplified, I wondered if there was a way for me to introduce myself and my life story to them in a way that they might appreciate. An illustrated book seemed perfect for that purpose. What did you learn in the process of creating Turning Pages? What was it like for you to collaborate with Lulu Delacre and to see your memories come to life through her illustrations?

In our search for an illustrator, my publisher and I went through a long process of elimination. To her credit, she asked me what I didn’t like: styles that were too abstract, too dark in coloring. I said, “It has to be bright, it has to reflect my family’s home in the island of Puerto Rico, and it has to be lifelike—I want readers to see me as a person and not a cartoon.” As soon as I saw Lulu’s work, I said, “This is it.” The amount of research she did was so impressive, and it really was a collaborative effort. I had a suitcase full of pictures that I had been collecting, from my family and my mother. She went through every single one—and all of the drawings of my room and living room and some of what I’m wearing came from those photos.

{ children’s }

Sotomayor revisits her life in two inspiring books

One of the funniest moments of the process was when she showed me an illustration of me wearing a pair of flowered pants. I told her that I would have never worn those. “Sonia?” she said, sending me a picture of myself wearing the pants. “Well,” I said, “my taste has evolved since then!” Lulu was always so responsive. Working with her was one of the biggest treats of the book. You talk a lot about the books that have influenced you personally. If you could make one recommendation to kids today, based on your experience, what would it be?

When kids ask me that, I say there are so many books I love; mentioning one seems unfair. I might tell everybody to read the Bible. My reasons aren’t necessarily religious: so much of art is reflected in the Bible... if you want to be a student of art, of reading... For me, when I travel to Europe, some of the churches have the earliest art forms. One of my favorite fantasy books for kids is Watership Down. But should everyone read it? You have photos of your goddaughter Alexia and your niece Kiley in the book. What inspires you about reading with the kids in your life?

I tend to send books to my niece randomly. One day, not long after I sent her The Giving Tree, I picked up the phone and heard my sister’s voice: “Sonia, I think you better listen to your niece.” “Kiley, what’s up, sweetheart?” I asked. She said, “You sent me the saddest book, Titi. It’s the first time you’ve ever sent me something like this—it was so sad!”

“It’s trying to teach you a lesson, both about life and about giving—that sometimes it doesn’t come back to you, but you give because you love.”

I told her, “I know, sweetie, but it’s trying to teach you a lesson, both about life and about giving—that sometimes it doesn’t come back to you, but you give because you love.” And we had a very deep conversation about giving and about how sometimes it’s not reciprocated. This wasn’t about me trying to tell them a story about what happened to me. She could see in a character she was reading about a real-life experience. I wanted to create that experience— even if maybe not consciously—as I wrote. I wanted readers to see me as a real person. I wanted to do that in a way that was engaging, but these experiences weren’t magical. They’re real life.

JUSTICE SONYA SOTOMAYOR Saturday, Nov. 17, 1 p.m. Chapman Conference Center, Building 3, 2nd Floor, Room 3210

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{ children’s }

Self-Searcher Pablo Cartaya explores his roots

In Pablo Cartaya’s Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish, the titular character goes in search of his Puerto Rican roots. We spoke to Cartaya about cultural identity, growing up, and finding mirrors in diverse characters. Marcus Vega feels disconnected from Puerto Rico, his father’s home, but doesn’t feel right in Philadelphia either. Can you talk about how you developed his character?

When I was a kid—and well into adulthood—I felt I straddled two identities. I’m Cuban-American, and I grew up speaking Spanish at home and English at school; eventually, I mixed both as a form of communicating. But I never felt I was enough of one culture or another. Through Marcus, I wanted to speak to the idea of identity as complicated and often alienating. Marcus’s immediate and extended family members are incredibly vibrant. Were they based on anyone you know?

Every character has pieces of people I know, including myself. They carry some emotional and personal truth from my own life. I believe that is our great responsibility as writers: to imbue a sense of personal connection to the characters we’re creating. This gives them authenticity and truth.

BY MATIA BURNETT

“Stories give us permission to reflect on who we are, to feel seen, and to exhale, knowing we are not alone.” As Marcus seeks out a greater understanding of his roots, he learns a lot about himself. Can you talk about his journey?

Marcus casts aside his previous selfperceptions and gives himself permission to believe that he is more than he’s given himself credit for. Ultimately, connecting with his Puerto Rican roots fills a void he’s had since his father left him. In the end, it wasn’t his father who he needed to feel whole; it was his culture. How important is it for kids of all backgrounds to see themselves reflected in literature?

It is as important as breathing air. Stories give us permission to reflect on who we are, to feel seen, and to exhale, knowing we are not alone.

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YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME: HEARTWARMING STORIES OF IDENTITY & BELONGING Sunday, November 18, 2 p.m. Wembly’s Author Tent, upper plaza of Children’s Alley

Fall Highlights from Vintage Español Coming in Spanish

¡Buen día, buenas noches! (Spanish-language edition of Gmorning, Gnight!) On Sale 12/11/18 9780525566878 On Sale 10/23/18 9780525566717

From the creator and star of Hamilton, with beautiful illustrations by Jonny Sun, comes a book of affirmations to inspire readers at the beginning and end of each day. “Good morning. Do NOT get stuck in the comments section of life today. Make, do, create the things. Let others tussle it out. Vamos!”

From one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalistic writings from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s—work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction. “I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism.”

–Meet Our Authors

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Miami Book Fair–

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Jorge Ramos Sandra Cisneros in conversation 11/17

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www.VintageEspanol.com |

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Into the Darkdeep

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Friends and collaborators Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs venture into the unknown BY CLAIRE KIRCH

The Darkdeep, the first of two middle grade books in a duology by bestselling YA authors Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, has been described by the publisher, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, as “Stranger Things meets The Goonies with the heart of Stand by Me.” It’s fitting that Reichs and Condie write about tight bonds between friends embarking on wondrous adventures, because, as Reichs says, “we are super-duper best friends.” The coauthors first met at the Yallfest literary festival in 2014, after Reichs moderated a keynote panel featuring Condie. The two cemented their friendship at Yallwest in 2015, and the rest is history. The BFFs even went on to attend the Vermont College of Fine Arts in pursuit of MFA degrees in writing for children and young adults. The authors’ first cowritten project, The Darkdeep, is a paranormal mystery set in Still Cove, a mill town in the Pacific Northwest. Four children discover a hidden island in the middle of town; there, they find a portal to

{ children’s }

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA another dimension where imaginary things turn into reality. At first, it’s spectacular fun, but, as often happens with magical portals, circumstances soon turn menacing. Nightmares and frightful imaginings emerge and begin spreading out of congtrol. Working in close creative collaboration is an adventure in itself; it can test the bounds of any friendship. But Condie believes that having a writing partner is invaluable. “It’s easier to write with somebody else,” she says, “because when you have someone who cares about the book as much as you do, you have access to double the ideas!” Reichs couldn’t agree more, saying that, with their similar senses of humor, their work comes together organically. “Ally and I were both looking to write something a little different,” Reichs says, “I think it was Ally who first had the idea, and it spiraled from there. While discussing things we

liked in kids’ books, this whole framework fell into place.” Creative projects are always mysterious; whatever comes next for the coauthors, Reichs promises readers that “it will be shocking, interesting, and a little weird and that we will always pay attention to our characters.”

VISIT US at the fair

1/3 Vertical Right Page THE PLOT THICKENS: SECRET ADVENTURE STORIES Sunday, November 18, 3 p.m. Wembly Wordsmith’s Storytorium, Children’s Alley

“When you have someone who cares about the book as much as you do, you have access to double the ideas!” —Ally Condie @floridapress

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SHOP OUR HOLIDAY SALE upress.ufl.edu

{ children’s }

Reading = Hope × Change Jacqueline Woodson is on a mission to spread hope through books

BY MATIA BURNETT

that idea in The Day You Begin: “For each of us, there comes the point where we enter a space and feel on the outside of it. For the very young, it often happens the first time they enter a classroom.” Woodson’s aim in writing the story was to show characters who walk into an unfamiliar space and emerge “more thoughtful, happier, more relaxed.” Despite their different formats and audiences, Woodson’s picture book and novel have thematic similarities. In Harbor Me, Woodson writes about a group of students who gather to openly communicate with one another about their lives without the presence of adults. “I think, too often, we don’t have these safe spaces where we can fully be ourselves,” Woodson says. “I think the question of whether we adequately listen

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to what youth have to say is one that every adult should ask themselves.” Given today’s climate of political and social discord, Woodson’s focus in her work on communication and understanding is timely. Yet, Woodson doesn’t intentionally infuse her stories with allusions to current events. “I try to keep my head down while I’m writing,” Woodson says. “For Harbor Me, one may think it feels very ‘current,’ but I’m writing about things that have been happening for decades. For The Day You Begin—lifetimes. So the sadness is that so much hasn’t changed. But I do a lot of self-care around myself and my writing.”

AUTHOR JACQUELINE WOODSON Friday, November 16, 12:30 p.m. Chapman Conference Center, Building 3, 2nd Floor, Room 3210

A different version of this article previously appeared in PW

To say it has been a big year for National Book Award–winning author Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) would be an understatement. To start with, Woodson was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2018–2019. Woodson takes her new role very seriously. In fact, she brings to her ambassadorship a unique equation that she coined: Reading = Hope x Change. To Woodson, the equation represents “everything. We read,” Woodson says. “We find hope in what we read, and that reading and hope changes us.” This year, Woodson is also publishing two new books: The Day You Begin, a picture book illustrated by Rafael López, and Harbor Me, a middle grade novel. Woodson garnered inspiration for The Day You Begin from a passage in Brown Girl Dreaming in which she writes about her great-great-grandfather’s experience of being the only child of color among white students. She wanted to expand

“We Read. We find hope in what we read, and that reading and hope changes us.”

People Are Buzzing About . . .

••••••••••••

Merci SuÁrez Changes Gears

••••••••••••

“Merci Suárez has my heart.”

★ “A must read.”

— Rebecca Stead, Newbery Medal–winning author of When You Reach Me

— Booklist (starred review)

★ “Medina delivers another stellar and deeply moving story.”

“Read this book so that Merci Suárez will become a light forever shining in your heart.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ “Pura Belpré–winning author Medina cruises into readers’ hearts with this luminous middle grade novel.”

— Francisco X. Stork, author of Marcelo in the Real World

“Meg Medina has scored again.” — Clarissa Hadge, Trident Booksellers & Café, Boston, MA

“Merci, merci me, did I love this girl.” — Jenesse Evertson, bbgb books, Richmond, VA

— SLJ (starred review)

★ “Medina writes with sincerity and humor.”

Meg Medina

“You’re going to fall in love with Merci Suárez.” — Cecilia Cackley, East City Bookshop, Washington, D.C.

— The Horn Book (starred review)

An Indie Next Selection

★ “Warmly told.”

A Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

{ children’s }

Hanging Out In Space The first full-length graphic novel from author-illustrator Molly Brooks, Sanity & Tallulah, is a fantasy sci-fi adventure starring two best friends living in space BY MATIA BURNETT

and using her knowledge to make things happen. For Tallulah, science is extremely cool and impressive but also a little mysterious, almost magical. I can’t manage the plausibility of true, hard sci-fi, but I can at least try to share the sense of wonder I had reading magazine articles about space, cloning, and solar power as a kid. Do you tend to conceive of your characters first or is your work initially more concept driven?

and beats that don’t seem to be working. But I can never be sure whether a joke is actually funny until someone else reads it. That’s one of the great things about having an editor! There haven’t always been girl characters like Sanity and Tallulah. Are you seeing more smart, female protagonists in sci-fi and comics these days?

Your titular characters get a little bit in over their heads as a result of a rather unorthodox scientific experiment. Were you interested in science as a kid?

Usually I like starting with a scenario and then populating it with characters. A few years ago, my friend Andrea Tsurumi and I made a collaborative science-fiction teen-girl-detectives zine for SPX. My story was about two friends who wander off into an asteroid field and find a robothaunted shipwreck. By the time the zine was printed and stapled, the friends were pretty much the same characters that show up in the graphic novel. Now I’m just having fun coming up with ridiculous situations for them to get caught in.

I am! Looking back, I read a lot of great middle grade and YA books with female protagonists, but what I really loved was the out-there genre stuff with dragons and robots and time travel, and most of that centered around boys. I ended up reading a lot of magical girls manga and adult scifi/fantasy because there were more female characters to be found there. I’m glad that girls growing up these days have so many options for seeing themselves having adventures.

How do you gauge whether a joke will hit the spot for readers?

I was definitely interested in science but more in the way Tallulah is than Sanity. Sanity likes the iterative hard work of it

When I’m going through drafts, I do my best to read with an outside eye and to be really aggressive about getting rid of lines

THE PLOT THICKENS: SECRET ADVENTURE STORIES Sunday, November 18, 3 p.m. Wembly Wordsmith’s Storytorium, Children’s Alley

Molly Brooks spoke about science, her creative process, and the joy of writing and illustrating resourceful girl characters who wind up in some major kerfuffles.

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MEET YOUR FAVORITE DISNEY PUBLISHING AUTHORS AT

MIAMI BOOK FAIR 2018 NICK ELIOPULOS & ZACK LORAN CLARK The Adventurers Guild: Twilight of the Elves

MOLLY BROOKS Sanity & Tallulah «“[A] fresh, realistic representation of future space exploration.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

DHONIELLE CLAYTON The Belles «“[A]n undeniable page-turner.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

«“[C]layton examines the price of beauty.” —Booklist (starred review)

@DISNEYHYPERION

@DISNEYBOOKS

FROM THE CREATORS OF THE HIT BROADWAY SHOW COMES A GROUNDBREAKING NOVEL. “The hit musical will make you cry just as much in book form.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A powerful exploration of grief and depression and the many ways we’re present (or not) for those around us without always knowing it.” —David Arnold, bestselling author of Mos uitoland

AUDIOBOOK ALSO AVAILABLE

DearEvanHansenNovel.com | #DEHNovel