In early June, a few days after my birthday, I finished writing my debut collection, LOCALS. We sold it later that month. Five years. That’s how long it took to write this book. Steadiness and patience.
It was all worth it.
With LOCALS, I wanted to capture the city, Hartford, that raised me. I tried to craft people, to reveal hearts. To depict geography. Streets. Parks. Bus lines. The North End. South End. And West End. To revel in lives that were familiar to me. Black Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Bosnians, queer folks, young folks, working-class folks, and more. I wanted to write about the basics. To focus on individuality rather than circumstances. To let characters embody not only the flattering but also the ugly parts of themselves. To give their lives complexity and singularity, and to generate something rarer and more valuable than sympathy in readers—compassion, understanding, recognition, respect. To bring my community to life as literature worthy of rigorous and artful consideration.
I gave my best effort.
More shared gratitude to come in the book’s acknowledgments. But to my agent, the incomparable Meredith Kaffel Simonoff (
@we_were_here ) at
@thegernertco , thank you for your belief and patience and creativity and fierceness. To my editor, Allison Lorentzen (
@alorentzen ), and the whole Viking team (
@vikingbooks )—I cannot wait to begin this journey with you. And of course, to my mama, who’s the beginning of all of this.
My proposed epigraph for this collection comes from Kiese Laymon’s (
@kieselaymon ) HEAVY, which I believe should be required reading. “We were mad, and sometimes sad, but we were other stuff, too,” he writes. These stories, these characters, ain’t easy, and neither is life, but sometimes it is, and I hope that as much as readers grapple with the difficult work in these pages, they will also appreciate the abundance of the “other stuff, too.” We are so much more than the worst of ourselves.
Here are some highlights, kind words, and friends manifesting for me over those five years. LOCALS is coming to a bookstore near you. Spread the word.
