#david bowles
Books I Loved Reading in 2021
In 2021, I read a total of 40 books (thus far) — which is the lowest amount of books completed in a single year in about a decade. Over the past two years in particular, I’ve found it harder to focus on reading and have turned to other forms of media to fill in my entertainment needs.
However, in reading less books per year, I’ve found that the quality of books has gone up. I’ve enjoyed or…
¡Qué bonita bandera! AKA what heritage(s) do you claim?
Mexican-American. I am of mixed ethnicity (half Anglo-American), but identify as Mexican-American / Latino.
When was the first time you saw yourself represented?
My freshman year in college. The book was The House on Mango Streetby Sandra Cisneros. I had read Latin-American authors in high school, but never anything by a US Latinx author. I didn’t even know that we wrote books. That same yearI read the collection of Mexican-American folklore Flour from Another Sackand realized that the cuentos my abuela Garza had told me as a child were valid literature that my schooling had stripped from me. I felt robbed. I was pissed.
How do you connect to your heritage through your books (if at all)?
My books feature Mexican-American protagonists in fantasy or sci-fi settings that draw from Mexican and pre-Colombian Mesoamerican traditions. Many of the issues I grapple with thematically are of particular concern to my community.
What do you hope for the future of Latinx books?
I want to see a broader spectrum of Latinx experience reflected in the children’s, middle-grade and young-adult books published each year, with unique characters that exist outside of the stereotypes. Such a vision can only be accomplished when the percentage of books written by people of color that accurately reflect the diverse reality of our times is closer to the actual percentage of the US population we make up. Fifty percent of school-age children are POC. Only 6 percent of books written for them have authors who are POC. That’s a major injustice.
What is the book that inspired you to write for kids/teens?
When I was a middle-school English teacher, across the hall from me was future children’s author/illustrator Xavier Garza, teaching art to the same kids I was trying to get excited about reading. He shared with me a fantastic bilingual collection of Mexican-American folk tales and legends titled Stories That Must Not Die by Juan Sauvageau. Not well known outside of deep South Texas, this book fascinated our students and others throughout the region, and using it in class, I realized that I wanted to write books for Latinx kids that would tap into our shared tradiciones y cuentos. Later, reading Guadalupe García McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas(which I just translated into Spanish for Tu Books), I decided to follow my heart and use our roots to craft relevant MG/YA speculative fiction as well.
What are you writing now?
My most recent MG/YA book is A Kingdom beneath the Waves, the sequel to the Pura Belpré Author Honor The Smoking Mirror. In January, Cinco Puntos Press will publish Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico, and in 2019, my graphic novel Clockwork Curandera (illustrated by Raúl González) will be out from Tu Books.
About David:
A product of a Mexican-American family, I have lived most of my life in deep South Texas, where I teach at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. Recipient of awards from the American Library Association, Texas Institute of Letters and Texas Associated Press, I have written several books, most significantly the Pura Belpré Honor Book The Smoking Mirror.
Additionally, my work has been published in venues including Rattle, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Metamorphoses, Translation Review, Concho River Review, Huizache, Journal of Children’s Literature, Asymptote, Eye to the Telescope and Newfound.
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