Voices of the Dominican Republic and Diaspora: Novels, Poetry, Stories, & Memoir
Join us in celebrating Caribbean American Heritage Month throughout June with reading recommendations, resources, and events.
The Dominican Republic is a country full of passion, creativity, and energy and this is reflected in the vibrant literary scene of the DR and the Dominican diaspora. Exploring themes of identity, culture, dislocation, assimilation, family, and tradition, the selection of works below—novels, short stories, poetry, and memoirs—by Dominican and Dominican American authors are just a starting point to discover the rich and diverse body of work with ties to this tropical country.
Novels
In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
It is November 25, 1960, and three sisters are found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a cliff on the coast of the Dominican Republic. The newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. The voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
Dominicana
by Angie Cruz
15-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, but when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes to help her close-knit family eventually immigrate. Lonely and miserable in Washington Heights, she hatches an escape plan but is stopped by Juan's free-spirited brother Cesar who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.
Neruda on the Park
by Cleyvis Natera
While her mother, an elder in a predominantly Dominican part of NYC, devises increasingly dangerous schemes to stop construction of luxury condos, her daughter, an associate at a top Manhattan law firm, becomes distracted by a romance with the white developer of the company her mother so vehemently opposes.
Song of the Water Saints
by Nelly Rosario
Chronicles the lives of three generations of remarkable Dominican women ranging from the early 1900s to the 1990s as it follows Graciela, who flees the strictures of her poverty-stricken rural life; her daughter Mercedes, who builds a new life in New York City; and Leila, a restless young woman coming of age in the high-spirited 1990s.
Caribbean Heiress in Paris
by Adriana Herrera
Paris, 1889. Luz Alana, newly arrived from Santo Domingo, intends to expand the family rum business, but buyers and shippers alike can't imagine doing business with a woman...never mind a woman of color. This, paired with being denied access to her inheritance unless she marries, leaves the heiress in a very precarious position. Enter James Evanston Sinclair, Earl of Darnick, who has spent a decade looking for purpose outside of his father's dirty money and dirtier dealings. Ignoring his title, he's built a whisky brand that's his biggest—and only—passion. That is, until he's confronted with a Spanish-speaking force of nature who turns his life upside down.
What's Mine and Yours
by Naima Coster
Integrated into a predominantly white high school, an anxious young Black student and a half-Latina whose mother would have her pass as white join a bridge-building school play that shapes the trajectory of their adult lives.
A Touch of Moonlight
by Yaffa S. Santos
Despite being a ciguapa, a mythical Dominican creature with backward feet, Larimar tries to live normally and finally meets someone she can be herself with but is alarmed that he works for a competing bakery chain.
Family Lore
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Follows the lives of several generations of women in the Marte family after gathering to honor Flor, who can predict the day someone will die, decides to throw herself a huge party as a living wake.
East of Haiti: Three Novellas
by César Sánchez Beras; translated by Mark Cutler and Rhina P. Espaillat
Delving into the adversities of race, poverty and discrimination, Sánchez Beras’ stories follow ordinary people working ceaselessly toward a better life for themselves and their loved ones. This intriguing addition to Caribbean literature is notable for its setting—the mountains and other local communities without a view of the beach so familiar to tourists—and its glimpse into the issues that lead to so many leaving their home for opportunities elsewhere.
Stories
The Rock Eaters
by Brenda Peynado
A collection of short stories that incorporate magic and strange worlds include the tales of suburban families that perform oblations to angels who live on their roofs and of flying children who must eat rocks to stay grounded.
I'll Give You a Reason
by Annell López
These vibrant stories explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. A young widow goes on her first date since her husband’s death and finds herself hunting a bear in the woods with a near stranger. An unhappy wife compares her mother’s love spells and rituals to her own efforts to repair her strained marriage. A self-conscious college student discovers a porn star who shares her name and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger’s freedom and comfort with her own body.
High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora
by Camille Gomera-Tavarez
This book is a collection of eleven interconnected short stories from the Dominican diaspora. It is a book centered on one extended family—the Beléns—across multiple generations. It is set in the fictional small town of Hidalpa—and Santo Domingo and Paterson and San Juan and Washington Heights, too. It is told in a style both utterly real and distinctly magical and its stories explore machismo, mental health, family, and identity.
This Is How You Lose Her
by Junot Díaz
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness—and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses.
Poetry
Plantains and Our Becoming
by Melania Luisa Marte
An imaginative poetry collection about identity and history on the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black Diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood.
Poemas de buen amor... Y a veces de fantasia | Poems of Good Love... And Sometimes Fantasy
by Pedro Mir; translated by Jonathan Cohen
Pedro Mir is considered one of the Dominican Republic's most significant poets. In this dual language edition, Mir sets himself the task of writing about love in a way that is truthful to the Marxist historical materialism he embraced, in contrast to what he saw as the conventions of love poetry where love is seen as some kind of disembodied spiritual experience.
Praises & Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic
by Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Angela Hernández Núñez, and Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo; translated by Judith Kerman
While the three poets presented in this bilingual collection present a rich contrast of linguistic and stylistic elements, each of them addresses shared political and cultural issues, illuminating what it means to be a woman living in the modern day Dominican Republic.
A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship
by Ariel Francisco; translated by José Nicolás Cabrera-Schneider
Francisco's poems deal with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millennial Latinx in the Sunshine State.
Muse Found in a Colonized Body
by Yesenia Montilla
In the book's eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, “How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?" Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content—observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice—but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love.
Memoir
Dead Don't Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Sh*t
by Julian Randall
Transforming pop culture moments into deeply personal explorations of grief, family and the American way, the award-winning author recounts his journey back from depression and his determination to retrace the hustle of a white-passing grandfather to the Mississippi town from which he was driven amid threats of tar and feather.
Something To Declare
by Julia Alvarez
In 24 autobiographical essays, the author presents her Dominican childhood, her family's immigration to the United States, her college years, writing, marriages, and return trips to her homeland.
Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
by Raquel Cepeda
With a vibrant lyrical prose and fierce honesty, journalist and documentary filmmaker Cepeda parses concepts of race, identity, and ancestral DNA among Latinos by using her own Dominican-American story as one example, and in the process arrives at some sort of peace with her father.
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League
by Dan-El Padilla Peralta
A Princeton University salutatorian describes his experiences as an undocumented immigrant youth in New York City, relating his efforts as a scholarship student in a private school that sharply contrasted with his street life in East Harlem.
The Washington Heights Memoir Project
compiled by the Dominican Writers Association; edited by Rose Heredia and Yamberlie M. Tavarez
A Dominican anthology archiving stories of Washington Heights/Inwood residents prior to and amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. Fall in love with this community of Dominican creatives as they share personal narratives of struggle, survival, and the power of perseverance through this collaborative collection of essays, including 22 English and Spanglish pieces.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.