“Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico“
with Jamie Figueroa
Thursday, May 16, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time
REGISTER HERE
In her memoir, novelist Jamie Figueroa excavates her roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Taíno ancestors. As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a “feminine collective” that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother’s history of trauma, emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men. Jamie chronicles her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man (“a hand-me-down version of one of my mother’s”), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching. Addressing Puerto Rico’s complicated relationship to the mainland U.S., she explores its nuances, along with associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation.
“Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to. Mother Island is a searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.” (Starred Kirkus Review of Mother Island, Nov 28, 2023)
Join us in this Salon as Jamie reads from her memoir and engages us in a deep conversation on the themes of her work and her writing process.
Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Jamie Figueroa’s mixed-race Puerto Rican heritage of Black/Indigenous/Spanish drives her fiction and creative nonfiction themes. As a woman of color from the Caribbean diaspora, she writes into the complexities of a multi-faceted identity. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award. Jamie is on faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, The New York Times, and The Boston Review, among others. MOTHER ISLAND was named among the LA Times “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.” Jamie Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.
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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:
Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.