An Elaborate Dance
with Melissa Coss Aquino author of 'Carmen and Grace'
#NuevasPaginas is a space that aims to amplify and spotlight Hispanic/Latine/x authors with newly published books. The goal is to connect readers to their next favorite Hispanic/Latine/x authored book through a mini casual get-to-know-the-book-and-author interview. So give please spread the news so we can reach more readers and continue the love/support of Latine literature!
How does it work?!
Here’s the deal, I came up with a set of casual/random/fun questions to ask each Hispanic/Latinx/e author, I interview. If you are new here don’t forget to check out all the other amazing interviews! We also have a great line-up of guest authors coming up so make sure you don’t miss an issue by subscribing now!
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Hey Heyyy Book Franz!
I love the idea of a book having a birthday. If this idea is new to you, it’s basically when authors and readers celebrate the publication of a new book - so they refer to it as a book birthday! Today, TWO of my favorite authors are celebrating book birthdays!
‘A Living Remedy’ by Nicole Chung is a beautiful meditation on grief and the legacy our parents leave us with when they are no longer with us. This one had me so weepy and yet I felt so full of hope. I made this Instagram reel about it. You might recognize the name Alejandro Varela because he was featured right here with his debut novel ‘The Town of Babylon’, which I absolutely loved. Well, he is back! And this short story collection, which I am currently reading is so freaking good!
Speaking of book birthdays, our special guest of honor featured in today’s issue is also celebrating a book birthday (!!!!!!!!!) so her publisher is sending 4 lucky readers a FREE copy of the book! Here is what you need to do to enter (it’s very easy): Comment below that you are interested in a copy of today’s featured book/author and you’ll receive a bonus entry if you share today’s issue with a friend and or on social media somewhere. Once you’ve shared it somewhere - comment again below and let me know, so you can be entered to win twice. I’ll announce the winners in next week’s issue! One minor entry requirement is that you must be U.S. based to enter. This is due to the publisher.
Without further ado, our very special guest author for today’s Nuevas Pagina issue is……Melissa Coss Aquino author of Carmen and Grace!
Could you tell me a bit about where this photo was taken? Is it special to your book in some way?
This picture was taken at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, by one of my oldest friends (Photo credit Arnetta Nash Diarra) in the summer of 2022, when my advanced reader copies came in. Orchard Beach is both significant in the book and in my life. It is a sort of sacred place for me. I have been going since before I was born, in my mother’s belly, and like the Bronx, and my family, the beach, and its reputation, have been through a lot. I go as often as I can. It was the first place I took the hard copy of Carmen and Grace. I do write there at times, mostly journaling, but some sections of the book were drafted there. More importantly, I go there to shed, to heal, to laugh, and often to dance. Just arriving there unfurls a sense of ritual and belonging I have never felt anywhere else. I felt it before I ever learned to call it reconnection with the Great Mother of the Sea, Yemaya, but when I finally did learn her name, I knew immediately where I had met her first.
Tell me about your book without telling me about your book - share any literary inspirations behind your book! If there are none, the gap you wanted to fill in the literary canon with your book.
Once I read a book it forms part of an elaborate dance in my head where everyone counts even as the circle gets bigger. Some come in and out. Some are closer to the center, but they are all part of the dance of ideas I participate in when I write.
I would begin with wanting to bridge spiritual journeying with a crime story where the crimes are committed by and against those we love the most. I am always drawing on the idea of growing up in a world we are taught to fear and leave, even when it is the only one we know, and is set in a larger world that despises the very notion of our existence. Moral ambiguity is a core literary inspiration.
Women and female collectives taking matters into their own hands, even if they don’t get it right, is a big theme for me. Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma Llanos Figueroa really inspired me this way as did Sula by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Women really have been boxed in by this idea that once they step out of line there is no turning back, and men have been taught that all their mistakes will simply make them stronger. Portate bien y que diran la gente really rules a part of our psyche in ways that limit our willingness to take risks. I have been inspired by reading about women who take risks, pay for them (and/or get away with them in some way), but are undeterred in their quest to feel alive and in charge of their own lives. Excellent recent examples of this that continue to inspire me are How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water and Dominicana by Angie Cruz, and More Than You Will Ever Know by Katie Guttierez.
What are two central themes in your book that you connect with the most and why?
The first theme is motherhood and the Feminine Divine. This idea of the mother, especially the good or bad mother and the absence or turbulence of your own, mirrored in the absence and erasure of the The Great Mother in human spirituality in the modern world. To be sure, ideas of the Goddess and Female Divinity are making a massive comeback, especially since the feminist recovered her in the 60’s and 70’s. However, many cultures, mostly Black and Brown peoples, have had a Mother ( or many) at the center of their spiritual practices in a uninterrupted way for thousands of years, despite the massive violent efforts of colonialism and patriarchy to annihilate such practices. In a most deeply, personal way my own very fractured relationship with my mother was only able to begin to heal after I began to see her as a lost daughter as well, and this was given to me by the spiritual journey and practices held in both the Yoruba traditions which came to me culturally, and the Hindu (specifically Shakti lineages and traditions) tradition of Durga, which fell into my dreams and then followed me around until I finally paid attention and found so much that was healing. The imagery and the stories of the Goddess Durga marked my life, and this novel, in the most profound ways because I found in them a fighter, and Mother, that resembled my own, and the girls I grew up with. If representation matters, and we know it does, imagine the power of representation as a supreme being in the universe. I could write about this forever, so I will stop here, and do more elsewhere. Of course, I also did it in the book!
The second theme is the desire to take everyone with you. The myth of upward mobility in capitalism is that if you make it, alone, that somehow all your problems have been solved, and your potential realized. But as Biggie wisely told us “mo Money mo problems” is often about wanting to take everyone with you. In our communities getting out is not enough, though it is sold hard to us. But there are so many people and ways of being that can’t go with you, and the desire Grace has not to lose Carmen, even if she is endangering her, and Carmen’s desire to not leave without Grace is intimately familiar to me. I am one of the last members of my family still in the Bronx, though I have left multiple times. There is some deep part of me that determined I would be the last to leave because I needed to stay close enough to help others get out, or stay and thrive. I’m not sure it is always the right way to “be” but the desire to keep your world and transform your life is fraught and very real.
If a book was home, where would your home be?
Definitely in the Bronx. It holds rooms filled with experiences from other parts of the world, but it will aways call the Bronx home.
If your book was a famous musician who would it be?
I’m going to need to cheat here. (Also, I LOVE this question!).
If I had to pick only one it would be La India singing Yemaya y Ochun ( and Mi Primera Rumba) on her first salsa album, Llego La India with Eddie Palmieri. She is a Puerto Rican born and raised in the Bronx born the same year as I was. Her fist solo album had been totally in English. It was house music and had been a hit. Suddenly in 1992 she appears with a cigar in hand (a La Lupe) and singing in Spanish to the Orishas, which was far less understood by the mainstream back then, though it has always been a practice in Puerto Rican and Cuban salsa including, by the legends Hector Lavoe and Celia Cruz. It was a revelation. It was like she had been revealed as her fullest self, her fullest voice, by refusing to reject the roots that felt real to her. She was incredibly young (16 when she started), and her career was being handled by a lot of older men. She was claiming power in a historically male dominated space. The writing of the section when Grace enters Toro’s house, and Durka’s “care” in 1992, began in earnest around 2012, and La India’s voice on that album was my portal back to 1992. I though a lot about how listening to it when I was 22 had felt, and how it still feels today: honest and very close to all the parts of me that I call home. Also, you have to dance when you hear it, and I am a salsera to the bone.
BUT…
I also hear Carmen and Grace singing with the voice of La India, backed up by the guitar riffs and mystical lyrics of Heart and working with the swagger of Nas. The book, like the two main characters, really tries to hold all of its disparate parts together with love, rhythm and honesty.
What comfort food could a reader pair with your book?
Bistec encebollado con tostones y aguacate. (thin steak in onions with fried green plantains and a side of avocado.) Extra vinegar, garlic and onions. ( vegetarians/vegans can imagine it with their favorite seitan meat substitute!)
In what ways has access (or little to no access) to Hispanic/Latinx/e literature defined you as a writer?
I came of age when Latinx Lit was impossible to find, especially on the east coast. We had Nicholasa Mohr, Piri Thomas, the Nuyorican Poets, and none of it was taught in any school I ever went to, though I know many educators even back then were working hard to bring it in. I was nineteen years old before I ever read a book by a Latinx author, and it was Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua. Few books have had such an impact on me. I took off looking for everything I could find after that and discovered the treasure trove of Chicana/o literature and earlier Puerto Rican writers like Jesus Colon, who were lesser known but vital to our development.
What I did find early on, that shaped me profoundly, was books by African American women. At every point they emerged as my guides and literary mentors starting in the 4th grade with Ludell by Brenda Wilkinson to Lorraine Hansberry in high school, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison in college, and then Audre Lorde, who I always tell people felt like reading words that baptized me in living water. I feel most deeply shaped by having read these works and felt a sort of ‘foundness’ in them I had not found elsewhere. What I am most grateful for now is the diversity of Latinx authors writing across genres and cultural, racial and gender/sexual identities. There is no one story about us. It is very liberating and inspiring to see and read. I teach Latinx literature at Bronx Community College, and I still get students who have read very little by Latinx authors, and I am inspired by how much I can bring to them now.
Where can readers keep up with your work?
Website: Melissacossaquino.com
Instagram: @melissacossaquino
Facebook: Melissa Coss Aquino
Twitter: @mcossaquino
Thank you to Melissa Coss Aquino for taking the time to chat with me about their book! Please please make sure you purchase a copy (or request your local library carry a copy) #SupportLatinxLit!
Melissa Coss Aquino is a Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. She received her MFA from the City College of New York, CUNY, and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY in English. She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She is a proud IWWG, VONA, AROHO, and Hedgebrook alumna. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and journals including Centro, Caminos Reales, We’moon 2022, MomEgg Review, Callaloo, The Fairy Tale Review and others. Her novel Carmen and Grace is forthcoming from William Morrow Harper Collins April 2023.
Synopsis for Carmen and Grace from the Bookshop website:
An emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama about two cousins lured into the underground drug trade at a young age and the inextricable ties that bind them, as one woman seeks power and the other seeks a way out--the debut of a vibrant and stunningly original new voice in fiction.
Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls--more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen's upbringing too.
Durka is more than a beneficent force in their Bronx neighborhood, though. She's also the leader of an underground drug empire, a larger-than-life matriarch who understands the vital importance of taking what power she can in a world too often ruled by violent men. So, when Durka dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, Carmen and Grace's lives are thrown into chaos. Grace has been primed to take over and has grand plans to expand the business. While Carmen is ready to move on--from the shadow of Durka and her high expectations and, most of all, from always looking over her shoulder in fear. She's also harboring a secret: she's pregnant and starting to show, and desperate to build a new life before the baby arrives.
But how can Carmen leave the only family she's ever known--this tight sisterhood of women known as the D. O. D., a group of lost girls turned skilled professionals under Durka's guiding hand, all bonded in their spirituality and merciless support for one another--especially now, when outside threats are circling, and Grace's plans are speeding recklessly forward?
As tough and tender as its main characters, Carmen and Grace will grab readers from the first page with its raw beauty, depth of feeling, and heart-pounding plot. A moving meditation on the choices of women and the legacy of violence, it's a devastatingly wise and intimate story about the bonds of female friendship, ambition, and found family.
Was coming here to say I've heard incredible things about this book, and you're running a giveaway! :) I'd love to win a copy!
I also shared via my bookstagram @LaReaderLoca!