The Writer’s Center welcomes Diana Rojas for a discussion of debut collection of novellas, Litany of Saints: A Triptych. Diana will be in conversation with Ofelia Montelongo, author and Writer’s Center board member.
FREE & open to the public. Register below.
Diana Rojas‘ debut fiction Litany of Saints: A Triptych was published by Arte Público Press in April 2024. A graduate of NYU, she has written in everything from large daily newspapers to niche newsletters. Diana grew up in Connecticut and New Jersey, has lived in five different countries. She currently lives, taxed and unrepresented, in Washington, DC.
Ofelia Montelongo is a bilingual writer from Mexico. She has an MBA in Strategic Leadership & an MA in Latin American Literature. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor of the Latine Monsters issue at Barrelhouse. She currently teaches at the University of Maryland and she is a PEN/Faulkner writer in residence, a Macondista & a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. ofeliamontelongo.com
About the Book
In the opening piece, “The Lives of Saints,” an immigrant family from Costa Rica regularly prays to a litany of saints to help deal with all that life throws their way—including alcoholism, marital discord, illness and death—all while adjusting to their new circumstances as “Americans.” The narrator, a woman trapped in a subservient role supporting her husband, suffers in silence as the men completely disregard her in life-changing decisions. Recounting her family’s attempts to balance a traditional, more conservative culture with the new and exciting one in their adopted homeland, she is forced to reconsider gender roles, assimilation and religion.
Ticos, or Costa Ricans, living in the United States return to their native country in two of the three novellas in this thought-provoking collection. They discover it’s not the “Switzerland of Central America,” the perfect country with good healthcare, education and no standing army. In “Las Tres Marías,” three sisters raised in the comparative freedom of Massachusetts who return to live in their parents’ home country are barely teenagers when they’re labeled gringas and “doomed to become sluts.” In “La Familia,” Juan Manuel has made a life for himself in Chicago, but when his mother calls him home because his brother has been arrested as a terrorist, he faces an uncomfortable reckoning with his country’s involvement in regional violence as the Cold War spreads to Latin America.
Revealing the cultural dissonance experienced by immigrants, Diana Rojas’ characters grapple with their self-perception as they consider what they’re supposed to be and who they want to be. Issues of individualism versus community, loyalty to a distant homeland and a divided sense of identity pepper this intriguing debut.
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