 I can only answer that question from the most personal place, which is how I have navigated, you know, being mixed, growing up in Philadelphia as opposed to on the island. My Spanish being my second language and being wobbly in it, you know. I, being fair skinned, am I Latin, am I legit, am I real, am I a real Latina? And I would sometimes express those concerns and questions to my mom. She had no question about who I was and what I was real this, that and the other. She was like, you're real kid. But, you know, she would return me to the ethics and philosophy that I was, that she was raised in and that she taught me, which was, respect honor and caring. And, you know, these values that are culturally based, you know, the other thing I try to model with myself is that the brokenness, the partialness is okay. It's real. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining this event in the American Inspiration Author Series, presented in partnership with the Boston Public Library, Huntington Theater Company, and Porter Square Books, and produced by our ABLE partners at the GBH Forum Network. All of us behind the scenes are delighted you're with us in the land of American history, exploring our great, diverse country, its languages and culture, which are no doubt the springboard of our arts and literature. On your screen is a schedule for our hour-long event featuring the celebrated playwright Chiara Elegria-Hudis and her just-released memoir, My Broken Language. I'm Margaret Talcott, the producer of literary programs at American Ancestors New England Historic Genealogical Society, and part of its BRU Family Learning Center. It is an honor to share with you Chiara and her family history, this wonderful, truly animated memoir, and it's also a pleasure to host with some really great partners tonight, starting with you Lila from Porter Square Books. Hi, I'm Lila. I'm the events manager and a co-owner at Porter Square Books. We're really excited to be partnering this evening, and we're especially pleased that we can offer signed copies of My Broken Language. You can purchase them through our website, portersquarebooks.com, at the included link, and you'll see on screen right now the coupon code AMINSP20, which will also be placed in the chat. That code will waive the shipping fee for your purchase and will send you your signed book via media mail with our love. We're based here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but we'll send our books out anywhere in the US. And of course, the best part of these hour-long talks is that there's a whole book to dig into afterwards, so be sure to pick up your own copy at the link that we'll share. And now we're going to hear more about our featured guests from Kristen. Thank you Lila. I'm Kristen Motti. I'm an adult programs librarian at the Boston Public Library, and the BPL is thrilled to be here this evening in collaboration with such esteemed partners to present this conversation as a part of our Central Library Author Talk series. Now to learn a little bit more about tonight's featured author, Kiara Eligria-Hudis is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Water by the Spoonful and the author of a memoir, My Broken Language, which is what we were talking about this evening. With collaborator Lin-Manuel Miranda, she wrote the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical In the Heights, and the film adaptation is hitting the screens in June. Also in June, Random House will publish In the Heights, Finding Home, which Hudis co-authored with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. Her notable essays include High Tide of Heartbreak in American Theater Magazine and Corey Couldn't Take It Anymore in the Cut. As a prison reform activist, Hudis and her cousin founded Emancipated Stories, a platform where people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world. Hudis lives with her family in New York and returns regularly to Philly, where she is from. Margaret, back to you. And how lucky are we to have with us tonight, journalist Marita Hinojoso, a friend of Kiara's, who will jump into the conversation with her and will also act as our evening moderator. An official bio for her. In her nearly 30-year career, Maria has reported for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, and NPR, among other stations. She has anchored and executive produced the Peabody Abort-winning show Latino USA, Distributed by PRX. Maria is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has won several awards, including four Emmys, the Studs Turcle Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club. In 2010, she founded Futuro Media, an independent non-profit organization with a mission of producing multimedia content from a POC, Persons of Color perspective. She is the founding co-anchor of the political broadcast podcast In the Thick and her most recent book Once I Was You was selected for numerous Best of 2020 awards. You have an image of that right on the screen there. Through the breath of her work, Maria has informed millions about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. She is coming to us tonight from Harlem, New York City. And what's really fun for me about Maria was that she was profiled two weeks ago on the PBS show Finding Your Roots. The genealogists from my organization, American Ancestors NEHGS, serve on the research team for the program and host Henry Lewis Gates Jr. films bit sections in our building on Newbury Street. It feels as though Maria is sort of part of my work family, so it's a real thrill to have her here. So now let's get back to really what we're all doing here tonight. And it's Chiara, Chiara's family, her coming of age, and this remarkable new memoir. Chiara, welcome and over to you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for joining us tonight. It's really an honor to be here. I would love to share with you some of my thoughts about my journey in writing this book, My Broken Language, and also some passages from it and some stories from it as well. So I thought I'd start with showing some images that are related to the book. So all of you out there tonight can get a sense of what these stories not just sound like but looked like as I lived them. So it is a memoir. It starts when I'm very young before I've entered kindergarten. And as you can see in the top picture here, I'm on my mom's hip. And right across the alley from us in Philadelphia lived my Pippi Ginny, who's right next to me in that top picture. And as you can see, I present a little differently than they did. My mom has her hair straightened here, but she frequently wore it as an aphor to like Ginny's. I am mixed. I was half white from my dad's side. And even early on, the book concerns itself with not just our different physical presentations, but the different language worlds I was born into. So I was thrust into Spanish and English to parents who grew up in different languages. And I carried that kind of those battling languages inside of me. And I say battling because I was far more fluent in English, but also because as I developed a sense of self and a greater understanding of those languages, I found that they were equipped to tell particular parts of my truth, but weren't equipped to tell the whole thing. So I had to navigate and find ways to combine them to tell my story and my truth. So my mother worked as an activist in what was then called the Hispanic community in Philadelphia in the 80s and 90s. And so when I was growing up, she would have me look like be like her spell checker on programs that she was running. You can see here she ran a conference called the reproductive health needs of Philadelphia's Latino women. And my mom really educated me probably before it was age appropriate, honestly, in the alarming maternal health crisis in the Latino community. Mothers and newborns died at a much higher rate than their white counterparts at that time. She was also facing an AIDS crisis that was skyrocketing in the community and trying to get information and health resources to people who desperately needed them and who didn't have a lot of resources. So I was kind of steeped in this language of activism and health justice also before I even totally understood what it meant. I also saw it just in my abuela's living room. I saw good health outcomes and poor health outcomes. And I got a sense navigating between my white communities and my Boricua communities that there was a difference here. And that residential segregation had really cost my mother's side of the family and that community better health outcomes. So that's another part of the book, Latina Health Vocab from the 80s. Okay, next slide, please. So another language that the book goes into, as you can see, I'm an adult here with my mom. But here are some thaino petroglyphs from the island of Puerto Rico. We're in Utuado, which was a hotbed of both political activism for the Nationalist Party, but also of thaino roots and community. So learning about thaino language, visual vocabulary was another important part of my growing awareness of my history and who I was. When I first saw these petroglyphs, I was a child. And I had a realization that my forebears, the thainos, because our family does have strong thaino roots, that they were writers. They prioritized recording their natural world and their experiences and they did it in stone. So I felt like, wow, I carry this legacy of being a writer, being a recorder. So this is at the same spot in Utuado here. You see my little sister, Gabby, and she's a woman here. She's grown up. But in the book, while I'm still a child, I'm 13 when she's born. And for a lot of my life, I'm the youngest cousin in my generation of cousins. And my cousins are very embodied. They are amazing dancers. They nibble you, sniff you, pinch you, slap your butt, play bingo. They're all over you all the time. And they also suffer. Their bodies suffered. There was addiction. There was HIV. There was gun violence that took one of my cousins' eyesight. So I saw these kind of incredible bodies and also these bodies that needed healing. But they all existed in other living rooms, in my abuela's living room, in my tia's living room. When my baby sister, Gabby, was born, all of a sudden, here was a precious Latina life that was in my living room. And it started something in me, a feeling of urgency to tend to and care for and protect that life, because I had seen the ways that such lives were disvalued by society at large. So there's a chapter in the book about her birth, and in particular, being a larger woman. She was always a chubby kid. And when she was about three or four, I remember she ran into the bedroom and looked in the mirror and she said, look at my big belly. It's round as Mother Earth. So before the world taught her otherwise, there was an inherent body positivity that she carried that I wanted to protect. And I didn't want the world to strip that away from her. So her body language became part of my language, too. I went on to become a playwright, and I was really interested in oral histories. So oral history is another language I'm contending with. Here you see me and my cousin, Elliot, who I wrote many plays about at the beginning of my career. In particular, his and other Puerto Rican men's and women's service in the United States military. So here we are presenting at a Pulitzer event, because I won a Pulitzer prize for a play that featured a character inspired by him. Those plays did come out of family history, but they also had elements of fiction. This book, My Broken Language, is really the first time I strip away the veneer of fiction and get pretty real about how things went down from my point of view. And here we are. This is me in 2019, I think, getting ready to film my movie adaptation of my Broadway musical In the Heights. The book doesn't take us through my professional career, but it tells the stories that enabled me from my own life and my own girlhood that enabled me to become the writer of the plays and of In the Heights. So that's a little bit of the background. I'm done with the slideshow now. And to discuss the book in greater detail, what I would love to do is have Maria Inojosa, my dear friend. We wrote books at the same time. Her book Once I Was You, we were trading stories back and forth about how's your book writing going? So now I get to be in conversation with her about my broken language tonight. Maria, welcome. What up, what up, what up from New York City to Boston. Hey, we love you, Boston. Chiara and I don't know anything about baseball. So, right. So Chiara, you know, you and I haven't been together since your book launched. And I just got to ask you, you know, I'm thinking back to my book launch and how exciting it is, especially because we were, we were like birthing babies at the same time. So how's it been? What's, what's the like headline for you as you've been launching your book? You know, it's been really interesting. This is the 10th stop on my books, my book, so I've done a few events now. And I didn't, I wasn't sure what would stick in the public. The book in part is about having too many influences. So it's about a lot of things. And so I thought, well, I'm throwing so much, so many selves at the readers, what are they going to be interested in talking about? One of the things I was surprised to find in the chapter on Latina health vocab from the 80s, I make short mention of the fact that my abuela in when she was in Arecibo Puerto Rico, she was one of about 200,000 Puerto Rican women to be coercively sterilized in that island's history. And my eyes just went like, you know, to know that your own abuela was, was part of the structural desire of the United States government is not the reproduction of the Puerto Rican people. Yes, you know, and for me, this is just one little fold of the family history, but it's something that people have really expressed interest and shock about. So these little details to get a sense of what the public would like more storytelling about. So I responded, I'm working on an essay right now, really going into the history of why the government cut so many women open. She was lied to, she was told that it was not a permanent form of birth control. And it just so happened, you know, the only reason I'm here, Maria, is because it just so happened, she was in the early stages of pregnancy with my mom, who ended up being her final child, the thing is the egg had already implanted in the uterus. So the tube had already been used, the tube was tied, but she was pregnant with my mom. You know, one of the things that happened for me, as I was reading your book, which I love so much, because I feel like in many ways we're very different writers, and yet there's something very unifying about what we're trying to do. But one of the things that I loved was I was like, Oh my God, I have this connection to Chiara, and I've got this connection to Chiara, because we are recent friends. I mean, we became friends in the last decade. So we're relatively recent friends, but a kind of deep and profound friendship very quickly. And what you don't know is that seeing the documentary called La Operación about the sterilization of Puerto Rican women by Ana Maria García, a very well known Puerto Rican feminist filmmaker, that changed everything for me because I was like, maybe I want to be a documentary filmmaker, look what she just did. And it was the exposing, it was using media to expose something that no one was talking about, which is that thousands of Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized. Is there anything else that, because I know I love this part of like, when you put the book out there and then readers are responding and you're like, wow, what else is there something else that they've responded to that you've been like, oh, interesting. Yeah, there've been a number of things. For instance, I heard from another young woman that I talk in the book about my sister is four years old when I leave for college. And I was very nervous about that because we had very different presentations. She had darker skin than me. She was heavy set. She spoke with the much she calls herself a North Philly John and speaks with a very like North Philly type English. And these were things that I was concerned were going to be met with misunderstanding in the Philadelphia public school system. And I was right, you know, I wasn't home to protect her to do the homework to be that big sister. And so for the four years, I was away as the first in my family to go to college, my first in my household to go to college. You know, her, she struggled, she struggled. And so I felt like a sister lever. I was a sister lever. And someone, someone reached out to me, they said, Dear God, I was a sister lever to sister. And I said, you know what, you're going to go back, you're going to take care of her, and you're going to lead the way. And she's going to be she's going to be stronger because of because of your four years away. So that's another little connection that was made. So you had actually never done a book tour, right? You don't, you do different things, right? Because you, you go, you go, and you are traveling around when you're opening plays, you know, if you're in San Diego, and you're used or you're in Chicago or wherever. Sometimes I felt like the book tours can be a little lonely. And the thing is, is that you're not lonely now. I mean, you're at home, you're in your upstairs studio right now. Your family is downstairs. They're well taken care of. Everything is okay. How are you processing this and what's about to happen within the heights? You know, we had these images of what our life was going to be like. In the Heights was going to release last year, there was going to be all this fanfare, huge parties, your book, you know, and everything changes. And I'm trying to think about how you've come to process how we're producing and releasing art in the midst of a pandemic. Well, in the Heights is pure joy. It's just pure unbridled joy, love, respect. It's, it's got a very cariño so hard, a very tender heart. And dear God, we need that. We need medicine in the form of playfulness and levity. And we need to be reminded what it is like to enjoy being human together in this same space. When I was approaching writing this book, my broken language, I knew it was going to cover, you know, for instance, AIDS in the Latino community is still a very under reported phenomenon. But it took us out hard. And, you know, I still feel the spiritual and emotional ramifications of that in the community. I wanted to look at these painful things, but the only way I could do it was to also tell stories of our love and our resilience, our survival, our joy, our kind of genius ability to party through the hard times. And now after a year, after a very painful year of being in isolation, it makes me even happier that I included all that humor, all that love, the fun stories of, you know, the first time I got my period and the dirty jokes my big cousins used to tell, and all that funny stuff and fun stuff, it's, it gives me something, it gives me like a soft place to land, even when, when covering dark stories. I really love that, Kiara. I, of course, I'm a little bit older than you, but, you know, when you were, when I was writing, when I was reading about you partying in the midst of the loss, and I was like, but that's what we were doing too. We would dance every Saturday, Friday and Saturday night with Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees. We were dancing with Puerto Rican revolutionaries. We were, you know, dancing through so much sadness of AIDS. And yet you're right, we were able to find extraordinary amounts of joy. You write about living in these different worlds. And I'm wondering about the experience of taking all of that joy that you knew was kind of like, you know, visceral and a part of you. It's like it defines you in many ways, Kiara, as an artist, as a human being. And what would you have, what would happen when you try to explain that in a non-POC kind of setting? And the way that sometimes people would be like, wait, what do you mean like you're playing drums? And sometimes people might be getting possessed. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about like that border crossing? Absolutely. The book does cover my time as an undergraduate. And, you know, look, I'm half white and I had been in plenty of white spaces my whole life. Many of them, spaces that I loved and that I felt very comfortable in. But I had never been in a space like Yale that was kind of isolated and that wealthy and that white that was new. And a shock to the system. And so I'm a very naturally curious person. I dove head first into my education. I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to read everything. I wanted to hear everything. But I was a music major. And in the department, you know, I could go to town and I could write a great essay on that Schubert piano sonata that I heard that I loved, you know, that honestly made me feel some type of way because it was a kind of sexy sonata. But, but if I tried to bring my influences there, I discussed the time when I tried to bring a Selena Ereotilio song, which is Cuban folk folklore music about the Lukumi, the Afro-Caribbean philosophy and sacred path. I tried to bring that into seminar one time. And there was a very firm line drawn in the sand. Music is not to be danced to music is not a social endeavor. Music is a purely intellectual endeavor. And, you know, it feel it felt like the heart and soul of this thing was not of the people. It was of the cat. I said, well, what the hell am I going to do this? Yes. By the way, you're right. And I can't wait for everybody to see in the Heights. It is. Well, I cried throughout the whole thing, to be honest with you, but it's tears of joy. It's just so beautiful. And it's exactly what we need right now. And I can't wait to be partying in the streets of every place in New York City as we celebrate in the Heights. The audience out there that Maria is in the movie also. There is a there is a protest scene. And we said, we want to get someone real and authentic to this advocate, someone who knows what it is to be an advocate. So we're like, you know, Maria was our first call. We're like, come on, bring it. And she did. She came downtown and she did a beautiful job on that scene. Can I just say that it was my first, it was my biggest dream to be in a Hollywood movie and Chiara made it happen. And it was the first day of shooting. And it was historical. And I can't wait for all of you to see the beautiful work that Chiara has done with the new script for the in the Heights film. Congratulations. Let me get that. So one of the things that comes up all the time, Chiara comes to my classes because, all right, well, the truth is I'm Mexican. So I have 16 jobs. I'm an author. I run a media company and I'm also a professor because I'm a Mexican immigrant. I can never say no to work. And Chiara comes to my classes and the students are very taken for many reasons, one, because I like to let the students know that there isn't always just a straight path, right? That you that wherever, however you end up in your life, there are many ways to get there and that we need to be patient and with ourselves. But one of the things that comes up with my Latina students and Latina students is am I Latina enough? Oh boy, here we go. You know this, right? Yes. What are we going to do about this? What are we and I understand them? Like I think it's hard like in my generation, it was invisibility. So I could kind of define myself as however I wanted to your generation is a little bit different. But this generation kind of feels like, can I am I enough? What do you think about this whole notion of our Latinas who are half Latina as you proudly claim? And it's like, yeah, but you are Latina. You know, I can only answer that question from the most personal place, which is how I have navigated, you know, being mixed, growing up in Philadelphia as opposed to on the island. And my Spanish being my second language and being wobbly in it, you know, I being fair skinned, am I Latina? Am I legit? Am I real? Am I a real Latina? And I would sometimes express those concerns and questions to my mom. She had no question about who I was and what I was real this, that and the other. She was like, you're real kid. But you know, she would return me to the ethics and philosophy that I was that she was raised in and that she taught me, which was Respeto honor y cariño, respect, honor and caring. And you know, these values that are culturally based. You know, the other thing I try to model with, with myself is that the brokenness, the partialness is okay. It's real. When I didn't know, you know, and you know who taught me that? A wonderful white woman named Paula Vogel. When I got to Brown University, and this is a chapter in the book. I didn't know how to go about being a professional writer. I didn't know. She looked me in the eye and she said with pure joy, she said, your Spanish is broken, write your broken Spanish. I said, Oh, no, no, no, I'm ashamed of my broken Spanish. I'm very ashamed of that. It means I'm not, I'm not right. She said, write your broken Spanish. And she gave me permission to be myself. Holy broken, multifaceted. So I think I think the more stories that get stories are a form of permission. So it's your story, Maria, my story, other stories that get written, they all become a form of permission, allowing people to be more and more themselves. When I read that, I remember crying. And now you brought it up. And I was like, don't cry. Don't cry. Don't mess up. But I think that that's why the title is so beautiful. It is my broken language. And, and that brokenness, this is what I tell my students is our superpower, right? When we're able to say like, Oh, wait, the fact that I have a broken Spanish means that at least I have a Spanish that is broken. And that is a superpower, right? And the fact that I can even think about having a language that is broken is a superpower. How many people don't think that and kind of getting that energy from our brokenness. So we're going to open up to questions from the audience in a minute. But, you know, Kieta, we have actually been receiving some questions previously. And I want to just share a couple, because this can inform you as we continue our conversation and says oral history and storytelling is almost a divine right among women. Do you have any suggestions for how we can make time for this in our own busy families, which I kind of love? Ricardo asks, what was it like to finally have in the Heights filmed and have many people already see it and love it? So can you talk about those two things? Oral history and storytelling among women and in the Heights and making it real? I love the question about oral history and storytelling among women. It's absolutely crucial and urgent, actually. And it's urgent right now because women's history is, again, underreported. Our stories have not have disappeared more quickly than men's stories because of who has been given a platform historically. So it's actually quite urgent to ask the questions of your elders, of the women around you. Why did this happen? What happened when? What was that town like that you were raised in? And don't just ask the question once. And yeah, we're busy. So ask it while we're folding laundry. Ask it while we're driving to school. You don't need some sort of peaceful, quiet platform. Let this be the noise of your life, these stories. In my experience, all it takes is you ask a question and people want to talk. So ask the question and don't just ask it one time. If I had a nickel for every time I asked my family, why did we leave Puerto Rico? Mom, what was the reason that you left Puerto Rico? I asked it over and over again and I got a slightly fuller, slightly different details each time. I talk about three versions of why in the book. And those three versions helped me get a fuller picture of what was happening in history at that time. Ask those questions. And if you can, if you find the time, write those answers down, documented. This is important history. If we didn't have that, we wouldn't have in the Heights. One of the things I love the most, Kiara, is your mom telling you in the kitchen that you had to write these stories. And that I love the fact that you also heard her and that you listened and that you said, okay, I will. Do tell us, though, as Ricardo asked, what is it like to see? And I just saw in the Heights what in March, I think, was when I got the link to the preview and my mind was blown. I've only seen it once. I mean, are you freaking out? What is it like out of body experience? Because obviously, you know, you're going to be, you know, there's a lot of stuff that happens with the Hollywood movie. But I know you can't. I know that you have your feet on the ground. But still, can you just kind of clue us into what it's like? Okay, can I be real? I'm going to be super real for a second. They don't all turn out like you want. You know, I know this from experience, you give each project your heart and soul. And you love each project. But sometimes they just don't turn out as you had wished. And maybe it's because the writing didn't quite get there. Maybe it's because the collaboration is off. There's all different reasons. So you don't take for, and it's heartbreaking. It's crushing when it doesn't quite live up to the love you gave it. So I don't take for granted in any way, Maria, that this movie, it's more beautiful than I could have dreamed. It's more dynamic. It's more energetic. It's the amount of voices that went into it. All the collaborative contributions from our cast director, our filmmaking team, I don't take that for granted. I feel very, very proud of it. And I really can't even believe that a book that I also believe in and spent years working on, that I really stand behind, even though it's personal, and it's hard, it's hard dealing with these very personal stories. But two things I feel so proud of happening in the same year. I can't, I can't ever forget that. It's a real gift. And we are so happy that you and Lin-Manuel Miranda started working together early on. I mean, I can't wait. All right. We have a lot of questions, Chiara, a lot of questions. But there is someone very special who has actually been preparing to ask you a question. And I know that this is someone who is very special for you. Melinda Lopez is a quite well known Boston-based playwright and actor. And Melinda, it was beautiful to hear Chiara say how thrilled and honored she is to have you asking her questions. Your work includes Sonia Flu becoming Cuba and Mala, and your new virtual play Black Beans Project. So we're very excited about all of your new work. Melinda, you have a question for the fabulous Chiara. Take it away. Oh, my God. I, congratulations many, soon as on this beautiful, beautiful memoir. And so much gratitude to you for putting these portrayals of complex and strong women and families and burro latinidad on the stage and all of the honesty and vulnerability that you bring to your writing. So I have a kind of a granular question. I love this conversation that you're having about my broken language and all the facets of brokenness and also props to Paula Vogel, who also made me cry. But your titles are so great. Water by the spoonful, Miss You Like Hell, your 2018 essay, High Tide of Heartbreak. Can you talk a little bit about where you get your titles? Are they the first thing? Are they the last thing? Like, when you want to talk about the nitty gritty of actually slapping the name on a piece of work and putting it out into the world? Yes. You know, they're definitely not the first thing that come. And sometimes the path is a lot clearer. So when Water by the Spoonful came to me, it came to me when I wrote the scene that involves one spoon, a parent is giving a sick child or, you know, one spoon of water at a time. And once I wrote that passage, oh, Water by the Spoonful, that's the name of the play. That was clear. And it actually makes me think of someone, a reader in the UK just read my broken language, the book and called it a baptism. They said the book was a baptism. And I loved that comment because I think I've always been interested in cleansings and natural healing. And so Water by the Spoonful really speaks to that part of my heart that comes from an herbalist lineage, curandera lineage of women who use the earth and natural elements to heal physical and spiritual wounds. With my broken language, if I'm looking at this pile on my studio floor of pages where there's like hundreds of titles written. And it was the last one, we titled the book very soon before it went to print. And for a long time, the title was For Possessions because the book discusses the experience of seeing my mother undergo spiritual possession, being mounted by the spirit and hearing the language of the spirits in her voice. That was extraordinary and pretty terrifying to me as a child. And she had a spiritual gift that I didn't understand and have much experience with, but I witnessed it in her and it was pretty spectacular and awe inspiring. And then all of a sudden, I have these four experiences throughout the plot of the book where I kind of lose my present tense reality. I get very physically, a very intense physical experience happens to me. I feel like I'm choking. And I come to after some time, and I've written something. And the book actually ends with the final of these Four Possessions, which was the first play that I think I found my voice in. And so that's what was called Four Possessions. But we were like, oh, it's about the plot. It's about the plot. We weren't quite happy with it. And actually it was like, but what happened as a result of the Four Possessions? And I was like, well, I found my language. And my editor, Chris Jackson, who's a phenomenal editor at One World, he said, okay, well, what was your language? I was like, it was broken. And so there we go. And it all made sense because there had already been a chapter in the book about Paula saying to me, write your broken Spanish. Paula saying to me, Shakespeare broke the English language and made it grow by 100 vocabulary words. She cited to me Tennyson's poem, break, break, break. You know, so I had, you know, and I grew up in Philly with like broken windows policing, like break dancing, like break was everywhere in my life, you know. And so what finally, finally we found my broken language. I said, yeah, that's what the book's about. It's impossible to imagine it with any other title. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Melinda. I agree with you. But titles are painful. And now I don't feel so bad about my experience when you say you have pages of titles on the floor because I was like, okay. So a couple of more questions. I'm just going to read them, Chiara, and you can take, you know, because I just like, you know, people have been so sweet to ask questions. So greetings from Sylvia Anne Suarez, Brown 95, who played Abuela in Caldo Santo at Perishable Theater in 2003. Thank you for your humanitarian work through your artistry. I agree. Susan asked specifically how it was to write dialects and that broken language. Dora Delgado asks, how did you get to know Lin-Manuel Miranda? Which is like, well, let's see. Fabiola asks, as a writer, how do you distinguish which stories should be told in which format? Because, you know, you are prolific in multiple formats. I do have to say this is one of my favorite questions, though. It says, Elizabeth says, in the Heights is wonderful. But we should also give some love to Miss You Like Hell. And Wei Han adds, balled my eyes out during the finale. Were it not for Miss You Like Hell, even though I had interviewed you about your work with Water by the Spoonful and your Pulitzer, but were it not for Miss You Like Hell, we wouldn't have begun our incredible friendship. I was convinced that Miss You Like Hell was going to break Broadway. I was like, it's the next in the Heights. Forget about it. It's incredible. And it didn't. And it was heartbreaking for me. But you see, people love that. They love so much of your work. So you can answer any or all of those questions. Well, I'll start with Miss You Like Hell. It's a musical for people watching who are unfamiliar with it. It's a musical I wrote that it was the first Latino musical or piece of writing I did that was outside of my Boricua experience. I said, let me, I was nervous. It's a Mexican American story about a mixed documentation family. So the mother's undocumented. The teenage daughter was born here. So she's a citizen. And I was nervous about being culturally respectful, culturally specific. So I asked Maria, will you help me? Will you guide me? Will you offer advice or point out to me where I've steered in the wrong direction? And yes, Maria was very optimistic about the future prospects of Miss You Like Hell, which was written with a score by Aaron McKeown. But I knew a little bit more, I think, about theater at that point. And I was actually fairly pessimistic. I had a feeling in my gut, I said, this woman's too real. And this story is too intense. And it's going to rub some people the wrong way, because it goes up to the mother's immigration hearings. And people don't want to see that type of America sometimes, even if that's partially the truth of who we are. So someone else had asked, how do I write the broken dialects, the different languages? How do I actually go about that? That's that's my favorite. That's what I do every day. That's my craft. And as Paula Vogel told me when I got to Brown, it's a muscle, it gets stronger. It started with my musical training. One of the other languages in this book is music. And I discuss all of different elements of my life with music, but they all are connected to the ear. And the ear is also what I use as a writer. I just eavesdrop and listen to the music of how people talk. I'm obsessed with it and I love it. If anyone has listened to Maria's phenomenal podcast with Suave, not only do you hear a story about mass incarceration today, about the criminal justice system as it applies to real lives in our communities, but you also hear a man who's conversational language is symphonic. So I'm listening to a story like Suave, I'm just basking in how this man speaks English. It is stunning. It is gorgeous and it's innovative. And one of the things I have found about having broken languages is it forces innovation on you. In fact, my mom had broken English growing up with me and I heard her innovate the English language in really creative and cool ways because not being fluent forces you to kind of think outside the box and find another way to express yourself. So yeah, that's my bread and butter. I write every day while my kids are at school, Monday through Friday, and when I run out of ideas, I take a walk through New York City and I eavesdrop some more. Thank you, Kiara. And for everybody watching tonight as you're thinking about your own stories, think about what Kiara said. There isn't a perfect language. I know that I never ever thought of myself as a writer because I was monolingual Spanish first and always felt not good enough. And so I just want to encourage you to heed the words of an amazing writer, incredible artist. Yes, she has all of the awards, but you know what, Kiara, you know, you're changing history, Mameeta, you're changing lives. You've changed my life in ways that I mean, well, we're friends, so I'm lucky. I'm so lucky to know you and have you as a friend, but you are changing lives. And I'm so thankful. So if you don't have your copy, get your copy of my broken language and enjoy it, savor each page. And we're going to bring Margaret on now. And Kiara's going to share some final readings. So congratulations, Kiara. Thank you, friends. Love you. Thank you so much. Love you too, Maria. Thank you so much, Maria. That was, I feel so lucky to be on screen with both of you. I feel lucky to be a woman. I feel lucky to be hearing from you as we all are. I'm getting some texts from folks that they are tearing up. So we're all trying to hold it together here. So thank you so much for your honesty. This is such a fascinating conversation. And it's covering so many aspects of the American experience today for us as women and for Latinas and and who is not excited about in the Heights. So I'm so thrilled. I wish we could go on all night but being respectful of everyone's time and dinner hour. I want to move toward closing and first with a final reading from the book. Kiara has picked a passage just for us. So back to you, Kiara, with that final reading. Okay. So as you can see, this is pretty late in the book. This happens while I'm a student at Brown and I have decided to quit music and become a writer even though what is quite clear to readers and later to myself is that my music life actually just went right into my storytelling life anyway. By Matt Brown and this wild punk rock, bad ass artist in residence comes and her name is Holly Hughes. And she's so wild the NEA didn't even like her and made her sign forms saying that she wasn't doing obscene stuff when they funded her when they funded her art. You know, she was one of these downtown theater artists and I had never met anyone like her. And the first time we met she she gave us this writing exercise and so I'm going to describe what happened in this writing exercise and she tells us simply write your identities. That's it. So she tells us write your identities. This reading is probably going to be about five minutes long. Okay. There we go. So every identity I could think of. I started with the chosen ones. Pianist, poet, composer. There were identities thrust on me, census stuff. Female, Latina, Boricua, mixed, 20 something. There were alter egos, rock star, girl who saves the world, barrio girl. What else? What else? I loosened up, got playful. White rice chef's apprentice. Girl with the stiff hips. Hides on Abuela's staircase during the party, girl. Then it rushed in. Jolting and heavy. As though a tap had twisted open or a water main had blown. Tremors coursed through my hand, knees, shoulders. I gulped for air like a toppled goldfish, full, nowhere in sight. My pen moved this much I could feel, but of some other accord. The ink was autonomous. It would not succumb to my brain. It had been a decade since Dr. Phillips essay test, but the same violence raked me. The same volcanic heat thrashing my heart, lungs, larynx. I was thrumming, asphyxiating. Holly Hughes, gone. Classmates vanished. My hand lanced the page, an undomesticated thing, a sword slicing through battle. I vomit any moment. Half of me pleaded stop, stop, while some other half, which sought no permission, thrilled at the precipice. Ride the wave, grab the reins, and mount the beast. Then time was up, and people were sharing a loud, and it was rude, I knew, how, rather than listening, I was re-acquamating. Regaining consciousness felt old and familiar. I knew how to do it. You're trapped underwater, swimming countercurrent toward the surface. Daylight shimmering nearer as breath, at last, finds you. Based on everyone's behavior, I apparently hadn't done anything unusual. Had my shaking even been invisible? It felt in the moment as though I had collapsed to the floor, torso, heaving, legs, twisted. But no one looked my way. I put my pen down, needed my throbbing hand. My classmates' lists were 10 items long, maybe 20. Their identities tended toward the accurate and objective, gender, sexuality, age. Thumbing through my notebook, I saw a list that continued for pages. Some of them two or three columns thick. My identities were neither accurate, objective, nor purely autobiographical. Reading them aloud, each one struck me as obvious, yet surprising. Badass. Junkie. Crack head. Twelve-stepper. Yelly. Illiterate. Witch. Welfare queen. Righteous thighs. West Philly. North Philly. Spirit medium. Santera. Quaker. HIV positive. I was somewhere in the recipe, but not the main ingredient. Asked to name myself, I had instead named my perez women. My matriarchal family tree. Each orisha is a source energy, with particular creative and destructive powers. Ya may ya, for the ocean surface, her ripples, swirls, and tsunamis, her saltwater hips, the essence of maternal life. O ya, for the tornado, the winds. The cosmology of my cousins was divvied up, too, into specialized forces of creation and destruction. Floor was wilds me, promiscuous me, junky me, recovery me, regrets me, me on the couch in a depressive coma, reborn me, serenity prayer me, me who laughs volume 11, motherfucker. Nucci was street fighter me, most truth-telling jokester in North Philly me, talk shit me, illiterate me, sits at the back of class me, me who lights a blunt with my teenage son. Mery Lou was church wedding me, laugh at the ceiling fan me, strict young mom me, shake your ass like your soul depends on it me, me who's going to outrun El Barrio, me who died too soon. Kuka was caretaker me, loyal me, virgin on my wedding day me, granny panties me. Gabby was planet earth belly me, lots of sass square ass me, diva style me, fat bullied me, dyslexic shamed me, sharp tongue to hide the tears me. My pantheon, my baddest women, my biblical ribs and mud. Out of their rough mortal flesh was fashioned my tempo and taste. Being 300 miles from Philly did not mean opting out. Each mile of distance magnified a self I'd always sensed, but only newly named. My cousins were that of God within me. They were not the faith I chose. Like mom's ghostly visitors when she was five, my cousins chose me, knocking on my midnight door, portentous at my bedside. After all my God-denying and God-shopping, after all my hours in Quaker pews, reading Yoruba books, studying Lukumi prayers, just so the universe could be cute a decade later and pass me a note in class, you were born into the church. Thank you. That was powerful and beautiful and I love it. I mean, our families as our pantheons, as our gods, you know, inside of us and out of us, our families everywhere. Kiara, thank you so much and thank you for this evening and I, you know, we all want to, we all want to see you in person someday and you are always welcome to Boston, so please. And we're going to move on with some quick reminders and some closing thoughts and thank you, Lyla, over to you about the book. Yeah, absolutely. As a reminder, if you enjoyed tonight's presentation and I absolutely know that you did and you want to dive deeper into the lives of Kiara's words and learn some more about all of this, you can purchase your signed copy of my broken language at Quarter Square Books. The link is in the chat for you and, again, you can use the code that's on the screen now and we will waive the shipping fee for Media Mail and we'll send that off to you with a book plate, again, with all of our love. Just mentioned in the comment field that you want to sign books so that we can be extra sure to put that in for you and, again, we're so pleased to have been part of this evening. It's been so wonderful. To find out more about resource services and programs for people of all ages at the Boston Public Library, please visit us at BPL.org. We at American Ancestors New England Store Genealogical Society are really delighted to have presented tonight's event. If you yourself are researching your family or someone else's family, our library and Education Center might be of use although our stacks on Newbury Street are currently closed because of the pandemic, you can visit our digital archives, connect with one of our genealogists online at American Ancestors.org or join in an educational program from our Brew Family Learning Center. We run countless webinars and programs focused on families and communities in America. People who have come from all over, from England on the Mayflower, from San Juan in 1966, from Eastern Europe in 1930 and, of course, we research communities who are already here. Our goal is to encourage people to understand their backgrounds and with that to understand themselves. We hope you'll join us again in this Zoom land. Until then, many thanks to our guests. Such a richness you've brought to our evening and to our lives. Thank you to all of you and thanks to all of you in the audience as well. Thank you for joining us and good night from Massachusetts and from New York City. We'll hope to see you again soon.