Author’s Corner
We treat the recent works of local authors from independent publishers like national bestsellers by spotlighting them across all our programming and through community collaborations.
Our Spotlighted
April Author
Patricia Coral
Author of Women Surrounded By Water
Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Spanish from the InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO. Patricia writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in-between. The former director of events for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines and her work has been supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her memoir Women Surrounded by Water is her first book and it was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.
Growing up in Puerto Rico, Patricia Coral was surrounded by women who fought for their needs amid the demands of domesticity and who were dismissed and judged when they rejected any predetermined paths on an island that itself has never been free. At age twenty-five, she married her first love, a green-eyed musician whose internal storms drove Coral to slowly realize that the marriage must end. Faced with disillusionment—with her husband, with the patriarchal expectations that surrounded her like the Caribbean Sea, and with the limited options available to her—she leaves, only for Hurricane Maria to wrench her heart homeward.
Coral evokes the beauty, love, and language of her family and of Puerto Rico as well as the pain of yearning for more. Tastes, colors, and the dreamlike lushness of childhood memories infuse this mournful and propulsive memoir of personal and natural disasters—and the self-discovery made possible only when we choose what to leave behind.
La Isla
The motherland has never been a free country. How do you learn to be free if you’ve never seen freedom? How do you learn, as a woman born in an enslaved island, to be independent? To free yourself when your own country hasn’t been able to. I left behind my mother. Daring to live a life better than hers. How does a colonized woman dare aim for freedom? I was born and raised to fear being left or abandoned. “Any day the USA could get tired of us and leave us to our own luck,” they always told us.
We’ve never been sure of our relationships. Estado Libre Asociado, translated it doesn’t have the same meaning, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The colonialism is disguised. Then you go through life and you don’t mind relationships that have no definition. You are used to being owned without expecting anything in return. You are used to needing your owner, you need to be owned. You are afraid to stand on your own feet: independent.
If you are independent, you could be persecuted, end up in jail, you could get killed. Because if you want to be independent, you’ll be part of a shamed minority. You have to become small because the smallest island from the Greater Antilles is Puerto Rico—“look how small we are,” our geography teachers always taught us when they pointed to the map. And there you are with the irreverence of trying to be big. You have to unlearn that you can’t make it by yourself. They always told you, “The island can’t make it by itself.”
You are a woman and you are an island.
“With all the garbage talk from 45 about the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, it’s imperative to learn the truth about it from the people themselves. This immersive debut memoir is full of robust imagery and lyrical stories of one family of Puerto Rican women.”
— Karla J. Strand, Ms.
“Poetic, intelligent, formally and culturally hybrid, and emotionally powerful, Women Surrounded by Water offers an important meditation on gender, family, imperialism, and natural disasters, amplified by factors like anthropogenic climate change and official indifference. It also introduces into the creative nonfiction genre an eloquent, sensitive, and talented new voice.”
— Glen Retief, River Teeth
“Puerto Rican poet Coral’s haunting, lyrical memoir will captivate readers drawn to raw, introspective storytelling.…With vivid imagery and emotional depth, Coral’s narrative becomes a poignant meditation on how family history and place shape identity.”
— Roxane Pico-Lenz, Booklist
“Whatever you think you know about Puerto Rico, think again. This gorgeous memoir is intimate, profoundly feminist at heart, and one of the most loving books you’ll read this year.”
— Hannah Grieco, Washington City Paper
“Women Surrounded by Water is a memoir-song-ode-manifesto-rosary to the Puerto Rican women of a family with ghosts for men. In the colonial context of the archipelago’s countryside, the men look to the national culture for identity and come away broken, while the women look to tradition, love, and religion to escape the guilt of leaving men who must be left. It is a story of betrayals, of oneself and others, and of the hungers of the heart such struggles leave behind. Coral has contained my very history, my heartbreak, along with her own.”
— Anjanette Delgado, author of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho
“A beautiful and intimate memoir with a lot of heart.” — Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“Patricia Coral has composed a work so intimate, so faithful a translation of emotion and experience, with its brilliant writing, its stories of marriage, its lineages of women and the personal and cultural fractures they endured for each other and for love, it is difficult to call this collection a memoir when it is also poetry and family album and historical testament. But it is memoir in the most urgent sense: with unmatched concision, honest remembrance, and adoring care, the author swims her readers through the heretofore terrifying, now vivifying, waters of life. ”
— David Keplinger, author of Ice
“Every time I read this memoir, it breaks my heart, yet by the time I finish reading my heart feels whole again. These lives and losses leap off the page. Patricia Coral’s language is alternately lyrical and lush, bold and unsparing, always with an awareness of history’s whetted edge. Women Surrounded by Water is a stunning debut.”
— Sandra Beasley, author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life
“’Women Surrounded by Water’ centers on the silenced history of Puerto Rican women and what writer Anjannette Delgado calls ‘our sexile.’ Colonization, patriarchy, and family tie women to the land differently than they tie men to it. Revisiting the history of her ancestras, Patricia Coral tells her own story while also giving voice to the experiences of three generations of women. Using memory and form to decolonize her storytelling, she invites us to ‘senti-pensar’ with her the process of becoming a woman writer, a Latina whose voice can shape the fragmented view we have of Puerto Rico.”
— Mayra Santos Febres, acclaimed Puerto Rican author and critic
Our Spotlighted
March Author
Varun Gauri
Author of For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus
Varun Gauri worked for more than two decades on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a summer writer-in-residence for The Inner Loop. His debut novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, won the 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize, was selected for NPR’s Books We Love 2024, and is a finalist for Foreword INDIES 2024 Book of the Year in General Adult Fiction.
Disillusioned with modern romance, globe-trotting Meena tries an arranged marriage with Avi, an aspiring politician in Ohio. But when Avi’s political opponent launches racist attacks, Meena and Avi are forced to defend their immigrant community, which narrowly understands its own traditions, and protect their increasingly shaky relationship. This is an intimate, funny, and heartbreaking novel about small-town America and the politics of marriage.
Meena pushed aside her veil. The gold bangles, heavy on her wrists, slid and clinked. She feared the audience would find the gesture graceless, clumsy, but she had to see his eyes. She would in moments be the wife of this man in the groom’s headdress. Maybe she already was his wife. The Vedic ceremony, hours of venerable ritual, had no vows, no exchange of rings, no single moment when choice, her will, exercised its prerogatives.
Perhaps sensing her nervousness, Avi caught her eye and motioned across the temple ballroom. He was offering the wedding finery for reassurance. He pointed up at the beautiful mandap, adorned with white and pink carnations, yellow marigolds, and fragrant red roses. He was smiling warmly, and his expression seemed to say, These old, magnificent powers guard over you. The betel nuts and the bowls of oranges, apples, and coconuts. The sandalwood incense. The ancient incantations of the priest, now pouring ghee into a bowl. The sacred fire burning at their feet. The expectant faces of all the lovely women in the audience, sharp-tongued aunties in embroidered sarees. The silly, sweet nonsense uncles, Avi’s father’s friends. The communal pride. The coming feast, with buttery spinach and tandoori kabobs.
He was saying their wedding conjured every Bollywood movie ever made, every Indian story ever told. And her husband-to-be was right. Every year, millions of people married this way and went on to have fulfilling relationships and meaningful lives. Or anyway, one had to assume they were fulfilling.
She and Avi hadn’t spoken in days, though she had almost called him that morning. Waking up alone in the nondescript hotel, like any of the hundreds of interchangeable rooms she’d passed through for work, had been disorienting. She nearly headed to the gym to run on the treadmill, her habit before board presentations. But this was no business trip. She decided not to call him because she didn’t know yet if Avi consoled well, or if talking to him would make her more nervous. Instead, she made herself coffee in the room. She convinced herself that arranged marriage wasn’t strange. After all, could any woman say, years later, that on her wedding day she’d really known the man she was marrying?
“This debut novel looks at a contemporary couple of Indian background who opt for an arranged marriage. Meena and Avi go in with eyes open and settle in small town Ohio with the intention of making their relationship work. Varun Gauri narrates the story from both points of view with compassion and skill. Despite shared values and caring natures, the couple must navigate the stranglehold of family as well as familial judgment. Plenty of other misunderstandings and conflicts crop up to challenge their decision to marry. Gauri proves himself to be a wonderful storyteller.”
– Martha Toll, NPR 2024 Books We Love Selection
“This novel has everything – gorgeous writing, a pacy plot, irreverent satire, lovable characters, and moments of devastating heartache. At the same time, Varun Gauri may be the wisest, most psychologically insightful of recent Indian American writers. You will understand marriage, romance, and diaspora culture from an entirely new perspective. This is a brilliant, hilarious, and wonderfully intimate first novel.”
– Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life, winner of the Folio Prize and International Dublin Literary Award
“Gauri’s vibrant characters steal the spotlight in this thoughtful debut . . . This is an often funny and thought-provoking tale on the nature of love and long-term relationships in a world that glorifies individualism.”
– Publishers’ Weekly Booklife
“Set in small-town America, Gauri offers a poignant, witty look at the complexities of marriage and cultural identity amidst political and personal challenges.”
– Princeton Alumni Weekly
“The portrait of [the protagonists’] growing awareness of what they really want and how little they understood it, makes For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, fundamentally, a psychological novel. It is Avi’s and Meena’s growing self-knowledge that moves the plot and that makes, at last, for an ambiguous though possibly better marriage.”
– Eve Ottenberg, Washington City Paper
“‘Economist’ and ‘award-winning novelist’ are not usually descriptors used for the same person, but Varun Gauri is an exception to that rule.”
– US1
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For Our Authors
- Work to get author’s books for sale in local bookstores and stocked in DC Public Libraries
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- Authors write a guest post for the Washington Independent Review of Books
- Authors give craft talks at The Writer’s Center or DC Writers' Salon
- Authors are featured in panel events at local bookstores
- Postcards that feature each author and their book with QR codes that direct consumers to buy the book and learn more are distributed to the broader community by our restaurant and small business partners
“Being in the Author’s Corner has been one of the most fruitful and satisfying experiences of my career.”
– Cameron MacKenzie
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