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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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MY BROKEN LANGUAGE
Quiara Alegría Hudes' stunning memoir, in which she describes her life (so far) with texture, smell, and emotion so delicately it is like poetry.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose work has garnered countless accolades around the world. She's a collaborator of Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights, as well as the screenplay for its film adaptation, which is slated to release in summer 2021. But before Quiara was any of that, she was a child who was a spellbound audience to another kind of theater - the glorious tumult of her sprawling, idiosyncratic, love-and-trouble-filled Puerto Rican family.
Growing up, Quiara would sit on the stairs of her grandmother's Philadelphia home and listen in awe and terror to her aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom were survivors of epic, bloody battles: they'd gone through wars abroad, from Vietnam to Iraq, and wars at home, with crack and AIDS and mandatory minimum sentences. She would listen to family lore handed down by her brilliant, enigmatic mother, and in her mind the women of her family, all of whom had suffered grievous losses, became a private pantheon - a gathering of powerful orishas with tragic wounds. She idolized them, but in order to become one of them, she'd need to get off the stairs and join the dance.
MY BROKEN LANGUAGE follows Quiara from her perch on the stairs and out of her family's whirling embrace to the Ivy League, where she holds her own and refuses to back down in a world that often treats her like an outsider. We follow her on her passionate quest to become an artist, and capture the world she loves in all its abundant but often subtle beauty. Her memoir is an inspired exploration of the concepts of home, family, and memory, but it's also the story of a sharp-eyed observer who comes into her voice and learns to boldly tell the stories that only she can tell. "We must be our own librarians," Quiara writes of the women who shaped her, "because we alone are literate in our bodies. By naming our pain and voicing our imperfections we declare our tremendous survival. Our offspring deserve to inherit these strategies. We have worked hard to be here. We owe them ourselves. We owe each other."
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a playwright, wife and mother of two, Distinguished Professor at Wesleyan University, barrio feminist and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work's exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. Hudes is a playwright in residence at Signature Theater in New York, and Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon, dedicated its 2017 season to producing her work. She recently founded a crowd-sourced testimonial project, Emancipated Stories, that seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world.
Growing up, Quiara would sit on the stairs of her grandmother's Philadelphia home and listen in awe and terror to her aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom were survivors of epic, bloody battles: they'd gone through wars abroad, from Vietnam to Iraq, and wars at home, with crack and AIDS and mandatory minimum sentences. She would listen to family lore handed down by her brilliant, enigmatic mother, and in her mind the women of her family, all of whom had suffered grievous losses, became a private pantheon - a gathering of powerful orishas with tragic wounds. She idolized them, but in order to become one of them, she'd need to get off the stairs and join the dance.
MY BROKEN LANGUAGE follows Quiara from her perch on the stairs and out of her family's whirling embrace to the Ivy League, where she holds her own and refuses to back down in a world that often treats her like an outsider. We follow her on her passionate quest to become an artist, and capture the world she loves in all its abundant but often subtle beauty. Her memoir is an inspired exploration of the concepts of home, family, and memory, but it's also the story of a sharp-eyed observer who comes into her voice and learns to boldly tell the stories that only she can tell. "We must be our own librarians," Quiara writes of the women who shaped her, "because we alone are literate in our bodies. By naming our pain and voicing our imperfections we declare our tremendous survival. Our offspring deserve to inherit these strategies. We have worked hard to be here. We owe them ourselves. We owe each other."
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a playwright, wife and mother of two, Distinguished Professor at Wesleyan University, barrio feminist and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work's exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. Hudes is a playwright in residence at Signature Theater in New York, and Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon, dedicated its 2017 season to producing her work. She recently founded a crowd-sourced testimonial project, Emancipated Stories, that seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world.
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Book
Published 2021-04-06 by One World |