Students Gather For Reid Writers of Color Event With Angie Cruz

By Yev Gelman

Angie Cruz

On Wednesday, April 19th, the Fordham English department held its annual Reid Writers of Color Reading Series and Master Class at Rose Hill. This year’s featured author was Angie Cruz, an award-winning novelist whose most recent novel, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, was published in 2022. The book chosen to represent Cruz at Fordham, however, was her 2019 novel Dominicana, which had been shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Over the course of the academic year, Fordham English professors have found ways to incorporate the novel into their curricula, so for many students, the April event was a particularly exciting opportunity: to meet an author whose work they have studied in class, and hear them speak on their writing outside of the classroom. It certainly was for me. Though I had not had the opportunity to discuss Dominicana in class, I was nevertheless able to read it before the event, and found that many of the values and experiences Cruz shared with us were directly represented in her work. 

The Master Class, held before the main event, was open to all Creative Writing Concentrators, and featured a series of writing prompts by Cruz that inspired participants to delve deeply into character development and worldbuilding. As an uncertain fiction writer, I found the prompts both inspiring and helpful; so did everyone I spoke to after the class. Still, I found the most exciting part of the Master Class to be the reception afterwards, during which the Creative Writing students got the chance to chat with Cruz more informally, ask her questions, and share reflections from the exercise.  

After the reception, the other concentrators and I made our way down to the auditorium where the public reading was held. Cruz began by reading an excerpt from How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, which experiments with form by structuring the twelve chapters as recordings of the protagonist’s interviews at the Senior Workforce Program. It should be noted that the only moment during the reading in which I was distracted from the narrative was when I went on my phone to order the novel on Amazon: that’s how good it was. 

When Cruz finished reading, she invited me to the stage for the Q+A portion of the event, during which I was able to ask just five of the dozens of student-submitted questions. I began by asking her if there was any advice she would give a younger version of herself, particularly in light of her audience: a room full of young writers. “Listen to people who say you have something special: they're not just being nice to you,” she told us. “Once I started listening to them, it put me on the path to do this kind of work.” To hear that a successful author had once been as unsure as most of us now are, and that the encouragement of her mentors was what moved her to continue writing, was both reassuring and difficult to conceptualize.

When I asked her about the importance of teaching literature from underrepresented communities as part of a standard English curriculum, Cruz responded both as a current college professor and as a former student at a PWI. “When I first got to college, it took me a while to realize there were writers of color out there,” she said. “[That’s] one of the most problematic aspects of underrepresentation: I had to be twenty years old before I read anything that represented the Dominican experience.” Now, Cruz encourages students to advocate for representation in their home institutions. Her advice for those resistant to change is to “rethink why people are so invested in keeping certain narratives out of the curriculum.”

In her own writing, Cruz centers experiences of Dominican people, particularly women, as well as victims of sexual violence. For her, writing about trauma and violence is a way to speak out-loud the ‘silent parts’ –– topics which were considered to be taboo as she was growing up. For her generation, Cruz told us, it was considered admirable to “put aside emotion and get over it to get the job done, no matter the cost to the mind or the body.” She believes that this silence had made her and those of her generation inadvertently complicit in benefiting systems of violence. With her work, she hopes to break that cycle. When Cruz’s mother first read Dominicana, a novel heavily inspired by her experiences immigrating to the United States as a young Dominican woman, “she felt seen, and that was beautiful,” said Cruz.

In speaking on violence, Cruz acknowledged that my generation has a unique sensitivity and openness to emotion that may make interacting with her work more difficult for some. “If you need to walk out, do,” she tells students; for her, navigating trauma in today’s classrooms means that a lot more time and care needs to be spent on every piece of text. “That’s not a bad thing at all,” she assured us.