Writing with a heart and soul
One of the best pieces of fan mail Alexandra Diaz ever received came in the form of a thank you note from a young reader to his grandmother, which the woman then forwarded to her. “The child had written something along the lines of, ‘I really enjoyed this book, Grandma. It’s not a book I would have picked out for myself, but I’m telling all my teachers we should read it as a class.’”
The book was Diaz’s award-winning novel The Only Road (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the story of several young children forced, under threat of gang violence and death, to leave their families in Guatemala and make their way to the United States. It’s a book that School Library Journal called “an important, must-have addition to the growing body of literature with immigrant themes.”
Diaz, a native Spanish speaker living in Santa Fe, is the daughter of Cuban refugees. , and her related middle-grade and , focus on Central American and Mexican immigration.
