Translating Silence into Story: An Interview with Angie Cruz

The novelist Angie Cruz was born and raised in Washington Heights. As a child, she was fascinated by the changing face of her neighborhood: immigrants from Ireland, Jewish and African American people, and increasingly, Dominicans, including her family, called Washington Heights home. Cruz studied visual arts at La Guardia High School and then began studying at Fashion Institute of Technology. A chance encounter while working retail made her realize she could be a writer, so she transferred to the State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton and earned a BA in English. After college, Cruz worked a variety of side hustles as she completed an MFA in creative writing at New York University.

Cruz does not live in Washington Heights today, but Washington Heights lives within her. In her 2006 New York Times microessay "A Sublet in Washington Heights," she recalls her return to her neighborhood and family after college, humorously describing the physical defects and oddities of the "L-shaped one-bedroom in a prewar building at 615 West 164th Street." The essay poignantly recalls the emotional and creative nourishment the apartment provided her. She explains she would not have been confident enough to write her first novel, Soledad, without the presence of her family, especially those "who showed up with Tupperware and slipped $20 in my hand when I looked tired from long nights at freelance jobs teaching, editing, and even window-designing while 'estudiando' for my master's degree."

As a graduate student, Cruz saw a glaring absence in the writing industry: there were very few people of color, and even fewer women of color, who were being promoted or published. Cruz began to render women's literary presence visible by creating WILL (Women in Literature and Letters). She continued this work within the journal she cofounded with Adriana E. Ramírez in 2013: Aster(ix): A Journal of Literature, Art, and Criticism. The "About Aster(ix)" blurb is a succinct description of the scope of Cruz's own writing: "Aster(ix) is a transnational feminist literary arts journal committed to social justice and translation, placing women of color at the center of the conversation" (https://asterixjournal.com/).

Cruz began her academic career at the University of Texas A & M and is now a tenured associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She has received prestigious grants, fellowships, and residencies for writing and teaching from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Siena Art Institute, the Camargo Fellowship, and the Fundación Valparaíso. Soledad was published in 2001; Cruz's second novel, Let It Rain Coffee, was published in 2005. Dominicana, her third, was published in September 2019 and has been experiencing notable success. The novel was the inaugural book pick for the Good Morning America book club and chosen as the 2019/2020 Wordup Uptown Reads. Dominicana garnered the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Figure 1.

Novelist Angie Cruz is the author of Soledad (Simon & Schuster, 2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her most recent novel, Dominicana (Flatiron Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. Photo: Erika Morillo.

Courtesy: Angie Cruz.

I had the pleasure of meeting Angie Cruz in Tampa, Florida, in 2018. She was in town for the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference and our mutual friend Aisha Durham set up a brunch so I could have one-on-one time with Cruz. After a great conversation on everything from writing to the kinds of herbs we use fresh and those we can get away with using in powder form, Angie agreed to let me interview her formally. Dominicana was out for review, so we decided to wait until it landed to do the interview. Less than a year later, we were in the right place at the right time, both scheduled to present in New York...