Search


	Podcast:		WNPR
	Episode:		LISTEN: Author Jennifer De Leon On Returning To Her Roots
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:07:58
	Publish Date:		2021-04-01 20:03:47
	Description:		Jennifer De Leon grew up attending mostly white schools in the Boston area, where she tried to fit in. “I was in this mode of survival and assimilation,” said De Leon, an author and assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. Then in her mid-20s, De Leon realized she wanted to reconnect with her family’s Guatemalan heritage. That discovery is one of the themes of her new book, “White Space: Essays on Culture, Race and Writing.” De Leon lays bare her personal experience of trying to reconnect with her roots as she travels to Guatemala, and explores her own relationship with the Spanish language. “At our deepest core, we’re connected to emotions, memories and feelings in a specific language, and we can’t choose that,” she said in an interview with NEXT . In one of the book's essays, “Mother Tongue,” De Leon recalls a morning when her son was about two years old. It was 6 a.m., and he’d woken up declaring he wanted meatballs. As she picked him
	Total Play:		0