Jennifer De Leon on "White Space"

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

Walter Dean Myers grant winner Jennifer De Leon discusses her collection of essays, "White Space." The collection explores her experiences as a Guatemalan-American woman existing in two cultures.

About White Space

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, “What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?” While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn’t been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family’s history, and begin to make her own way.

Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents’ home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

About Jennifer De Leon

Jennifer De Leon is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the editor of Wise Latinas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University, and a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at Bay Path University, she has published prose in over a dozen literary journals and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. Her essay collection, White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing, is the recipient of the Juniper Prize and will be published by UMass Press in Spring 2021.