As we shift the Miami Writers Institute workshops online, we invite you to to learn more about the authors leading this year’s classes. Each week we will be gathering internet clippings and highlights from a different author.
We kicked off the series last week with Bryan Washington. Click here if you missed it.
Who is Lilliam Rivera?
Meet Lilliam Rivera, the award-winning author who will be leading the “Teenage Rebels: How To Write Young Adult Fiction with Lilliam Rivera” workshop. Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of the young adult novels Dealing in Dreams, The Education of Margot Sanchez, Goldie Vance: The Hotel Whodunit, and Never Look Back (forthcoming Sept 2020). Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ELLE, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.
Read:
First Two Chapters From Lilliam Rivera’s Never Look Back
Acclaimed author Lilliam Rivera blends a touch of magical realism into a timely story about cultural identity, overcoming trauma, and the power of first love.
Eury comes to the Bronx as a girl haunted. Haunted by losing everything in Hurricane Maria–and by an evil spirit, Ato. She fully expects the tragedy that befell her and her family in Puerto Rico to catch up with her in New York. Yet, for a time, she can almost set this fear aside, because there’s this boy . . .
Pheus is a golden-voiced, bachata-singing charmer, ready to spend the summer on the beach with his friends, serenading his on-again, off-again flame. That changes when he meets Eury. All he wants is to put a smile on her face and fight off her demons. But some dangers are too powerful for even the strongest love, and as the world threatens to tear them apart, Eury and Pheus must fight for each other and their lives.
Watch:
PBS Books Interview with Lilliam Rivera at #AWP2019
Listen:
Novelist Lilliam Rivera Builds Worlds for All of Us
As a young reader, she didn’t realize people who looked and lived like her were missing from some of her favorite books. “It felt to me like I was reading science fiction in a lot of ways because it was so outside of my own childhood….And I was accepting of it like, okay, cool this is a different life,” award winning young adult author Lilliam Rivera tells Alicia in this emotive episode. But her perspective quickly changed after reading award-winning Latino writers in college. She soon became so empowered she came to see herself as an author of books for young adult readers. She is the author of the newly released book, Dealing with Dreams.
Listen on Latina to Latina Podcast
Teenage Rebels: How To Write Young Adult Fiction with Lilliam Rivera
Monday, July 27 @ 2:00 pm EST | Register to receive workshop link
If you’ve ever wanted to write a novel through the perspective of a young person, this is the workshop for you. This workshop will break down the mystery of writing young adult, from capturing the young protagonist voice to writing realistic dialogue. We will study excerpts from young adult authors and tackle writing exercises meant to generate work for the start of our novels.
The Miami Writers Institute is an annual creative writing conference produced by the Miami Book Fair. The conference, which has moved fully online this year, features intensive writing workshops with bestselling authors, craft talks, a publishing seminar, and individual manuscript consultations with a literary agent.
