Short-listed for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. A
15-year-old protagonist from the Dominican Republic marries a man twice her age and moves to the U.S. Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, she hatches a reckless plan to escape.

New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book; NPR Great Read; several Book of the Year awards. When fifteen-year-old Maribel sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it's not long before Maribel attracts the attention of the son of one of their new neighbors. Their story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. Henríquez seamlessly interweaves the story of these star-crossed lovers, and of their families, with the testimonials of men and women who have come to the United States from all over Latin America.

NYT best seller. Set in an unnamed South American country, this book tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics.

First adult novel by Alvarez since 2005. Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer main character, retires from teaching college English and her husband suddenly dies...and more major life changes happen within her family. How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those we have lost?

NYT best seller; 2021 New American Voices Award. Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. Rich with Bogotá urban life and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America.

New York and Chicago Public Library Best Books of 2020; listed for National Book Award and Booker Prize. The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

International Latino Book Award. The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he's already dead -- an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. So Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar's family--especially his wife, Elda--to let him redeem himself. Set in a Texas border town.

Today.com most anticipated Latinx book of 2022. Three sisters grow up with very different coping skills in their dysfunctional family. Years later, they are back where they grew up in East L.A. for a wedding and take steps to come to terms with each other. A humorous yet moving look at what it means to be a sister, daughter, and ultimately, your own self, despite the pressures that come with being part of a family.

NYT best seller; named a best book of 2021 by many. A half-Latinx girl and a Black boy meet in an integrated school in North Carolina, connecting their mothers (and families) and setting a trajectory that will shape their adult lives. This book explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.

NYT best seller; multiple awards; in development as a Hulu original limited series; a best book of the year designation by many outlets. After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find.

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. A modern-day story of family, loss, and renewal, Halsey Street captures the deeply human need to belong--not only to a place but to one another. Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She's accepted that her future won't be what she'd dreamed. When Penelope moves into the attic apartment of the affluent Harpers, she thinks she's found a semblance of family--and maybe even love. But her world is upended again when she receives a postcard from her mother in the Dominican Republic.

NYT best seller and notable book; Brooklyn Public Library Prize; International Latino Book Award finalist. Named a best book of the year by many outlets. This debut novel tells the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots. Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.

An innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a dive into home, memory, and belonging.

An updated edition combining Moraga's classic memoir with The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, originally published in 1993, along with additional writings from the late 1990.

In a series of journal entries--some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect--Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting.

From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother's decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.

One of "The Best Memoirs of a Generation" (Oprah's Book Club): a young woman's journey from the mango groves and barrios of Puerto Rico to Brooklyn, and eventually on to the Ivy League. Santiago brilliantly recreates her tremendous journey from the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years, to translating for her mother at the welfare office, and to high honors at Harvard. Santiago went on to write two more memoirs: Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover.

The star of Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin presents her personal story of the real plight of undocumented immigrants in this country. Guerrero was just fourteen years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. This memoir is a tale of personal triumph that also casts a much-needed light on the fears that haunt the daily existence of families likes the author's and on a system that fails them over and over.

Recommended by the New York Times and other outlets. The author of over 20 plays, Octavio Solis is considered one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. Solis grew up in El Paso, TX. His memoirs give light to what life is like on the U.S.-Mexican border.

A book highly recommended by many outlets in 2019. Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes and personal struggles. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

Martinez offers memorable accounts of growing up Mexican-American along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, TX. This book was a finalist for a National Book Award.

A young woman from Minnesota searches out the Colombian father she's never known in this powerful exploration of what family really means.

Critically acclaimed writer and first-generation American Jennine Capó Crucet explores the condition of finding herself a stranger in the country where she was born. Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture.

Tells the story of Grande’s pursuit to become the first in her family to earn a college degree and to find her place and a home in her adoptive country. Follows her award-winning The Distance Between Us. (See the tab "My Picks")

PEN America Literary Award Winner. From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter’s mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction.

With a vibrant lyrical prose and fierce honesty, Cepeda parses concepts of race, identity, and ancestral DNA among Latinos by using her own Dominican-American story as one example, and in the process arrives at some sort of peace with her father.

This poignant, street-smart collection follows idealistic teenagers and weary mothers battling over what it means to be a woman in love. From childhood, Puerto Rican girls are taught to want one thing: true love. Yet older generations are rife with broken promises and betrayal. While some believe they'll be the one to make it work, others swear not to repeat cycles of violence. Playing out are these 'love wars,' as individuals find themselves caught in the crosshairs of romance, expectations, and community.

Collection of ten award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.

Kafka in a Skirt is not your ordinary short story collection. Chacón subverts expectation and breaks down the walls of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture.

Winner of the Hornblower Award by the New York Society Library, Honorable Mention for the International Latino Book Awards: Best Collection of Short Stories by Empowering Latino Futures. Claire Jimenez shines a spotlight on the imagined lives of the islanders. Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, this collection of loosely linked tragicomic short stories travels across time to explore defining moments in the island's history, from the 2003 Staten Island Ferry crash and the New York City blackout to the growing opioid and heroin crisis, Eric Garner's murder, and the 2016 presidential election.

American Book Award; finalist for other prizes; named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the backdrop of Denver, Colorado, these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

Thrilling and terrifying, Things We Lost in the Fire takes the reader into a world of Argentine Gothic. A world of sharp-toothed children and young girls racked by desire, where demons lurk beneath the river and stolen skulls litter the pavements. A world where the secrets half-buried under Argentina's terrible dictatorship rise up to haunt the present day, and where women, exhausted by a plague of violence, find that their only path out lies in the flames...

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. In this debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment.

2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Stonewall Honor Book in Literature, 2014. Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes it's an escape, and sometimes it's just the bridge you cross to go home. Take, for instance, these seven evocative stories coming out of the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. It welcomes Spanish and English, Mexicans and gringos, poor and rich, gay and straight, drug addicts and drunks, laughter and sadness, and even despair.

Works that each present a complete story in less than 1,500 words. Features stars such as Sandra Cisneros, and Roberto Bolano alongside recognized masters like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Named a best book of 2017 by many outlets. Illustrated collection of twelve short stories. In this book, you will meet many young Latinos living in the United States, from a young girl whose day at her father’s burrito truck surprises her to two sisters working together to change the older sister’s immigration status, and more.

Latin@ Rising is the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy written by Latinos/as living in the United States. The 22 authors and artists included in this anthology come from all over the U.S. and from eight different national traditions.

Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila's stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted--you'll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear.

Collection of contemporary Chicano fiction: 31 stories depicting the richly varied experiences of Mexican-Americans in the U.S. The special strength of this anthology is that it introduces writers who have never before been published in book form, like Ana Baca, Patricia Blanca, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, and Natalia Trevino.

Throughout Roberto Tejada's body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. Here, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands.

Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging.

Finalist: 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Finalist: 2019 PEN Open Book Award
Winner: 2019 American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation
Winner: 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize

Finalist: 2020 Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist: 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize
NPR's 2019 Poetry Preview
NBC's 8 Excellent Latino Poetry Books for National Poetry Month
The Rumpus's Books To Read in 2019
Remezcla's 8 Books to Read this Year
Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of 2019

Prose poems introduce us to a mime, a skeleton, and the man in the Pink Floyd t-shirt, all of whom explore their inner selves in Diaz's startling and spare style. Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University of California at Berkeley and Antioch University Los Angeles.

Winner: 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize

Named the first-ever Poet Laureate of San Antonio in 2012, Tafolla was named Poet Laureate of Texas in 2015. This collection displays her mastery of the art of bilingual code switching, mining the riches of two languages--Spanish and English--to produce works that celebrate the beauty and vigor of a Hispanic heritage that has enriched American culture for generations.

The poets sixth book of poetry. Witty, wise, personal and political, Melendez, often weary of the social issues and politics of the day, has created an exciting compilation of new and previously published poems in a collection that he has daringly named after himself to nudge people out of complacency.

The poems included in this comprehensive anthology run the gamut of styles and themes, but all are by Latinos writing from the mid- twentieth century to the present.

A multicultural selection of contemporary poems by Puerto Rican and other poets who meet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.

YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with losing her sister and finding herself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican American home. NYT best seller.

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.

Named a best YA book of the year by many outlets. Two young men, knowing that they will die, find each other online and meet up to make the most of their last day alive.

An insecure young man is looking forward to a school break; then learns that a neighbor he has a crush on will stay with him and his family during break.

National Bestseller; National Book Award Finalist; William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist; Goodreads Finalist for Best Teen Book of the Year; Walter Honor Award Winner A sharply funny and moving debut novel about a queer Mexican American girl navigating Catholic school, while falling in love and learning to celebrate her true self.

Named one of the best books of the year by many outlets. In Rosario, Argentina, Camila Hassan lives a double life. At home, she is a careful daughter, living within her mother's narrow expectations, in her rising-soccer-star brother's shadow, and under the abusive rule of her short-tempered father. On the field, she is La Furia, a powerhouse of skill and talent.

New England Book Award winner. An NPR Best Book of the Year. Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat. People sometimes have a problem with that last one. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like. A sensitive, funny, and painfully honest coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme. Takes on our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves.

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021). Printz Honor Book. Stonewall Award winner. Pura Belpré Award winner. Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship--the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.

When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his best friend he tries to conjure the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death.
"Cemetery Boys is necessary: for trans kids, for queer kids, for those in the Latinx community who need to see themselves on the page. Don't miss this book." --Mark Oshiro, author of Anger is a Gift

A teen girl navigates friendship drama, the end of high school, and discovering her queerness. "Ophelia Rojas is the type of character that leaps off the page and directly into your heart-- [this book] is a queer delight through and through." --Leah Johnson, bestselling author of You Should See Me in a Crown.

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. When she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.

A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California's fields.

The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

Explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists, and relief workers, fearsome coyotes, and their desperate clientele. In 16 indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States--and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

Short stories from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people to illuminate wars, both national and internal, waged in jungles, across the borders, in the streets of Lima, and in the intimacy of New York apartments. Alarcon tells of lives at the margins.

After leaving the college she'd attended to escape her religiously conservative parents, Iliana, a first-generation Dominican-American woman, returns home to Brooklyn to find that her family is falling apart. Perez offers a penetrating portrait of the American immigrant experience as she explores the true meanings of identity, family--and home.

After Wopper Barraza's fourth drunk driving violation, the judge orders his immediate deportation. "But I haven't been there since I was a little kid," says Wopper. Now he has to move back to Michoacán. Wopper's story unfolds as life in a rural village takes him in new and unexpected directions.

Nelson's life is not turning out the way he hoped. He has girlfriend problems, his brother left and Nelson has to care for their mother, and his acting career can't seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson's hero, Henry Nuñez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that's when the real trouble begins.

In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border.