A New Generation of Colombian Writers: Authors Interviews from the Columbian Writer’s Symposium, Part 1

My Colombian aunties often insisted that I came from literary stock. As a child, I was dubious. My mother had not finished high school. She had been raised in a small village, in a family of twelve children. In New Jersey, I was the translator for her and her three sisters. None of us had stepped foot in a bookstore. But the aunties insisted we all had a great literary heritage, and for evidence, they pointed to Gabriel García Márquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude became the basis for a Netflix series in 2024. 

Doubtful, I nevertheless felt smug about the literary affiliation of Colombia with the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the late eighties, and my mother’s homeland only made the news when the drug cartels murdered a politician or when the English language broadcasters turned their lenses toward cocaine production and smuggling. It was a relief to be able to point to a celebrated work of fiction even if no one in my family nor I had read it. 

Still, like the other children of immigrants, I wondered: what about our stories here in this country? 

A glimmer appeared in 1992 when gay poet Jaime Manriquez’s novel Latin Moon in Manhattanwas published by St. Martin’s Press. Manrique had grown up in Colombia and had been in US for years by then, and his novel offered, as far as I know, the first literary portrait of Colombianxshere in the United States. The novel led to a New York Times profile of Manrique and of New York City’s burgeoning Colombian community. What came next from Manrique was a slew of novels, poetry books, and the poignant memoir Eminent Maricones. 

A decade later, in 2002, lesbian poet tatiana de la tierra published her book For The Hard Ones: A Lesbian Phenomenology with the small publishing house Calaca Press. Her book delighted in the play of English and Spanish, of lesbian desires and friendships. The founder of two magazines that highlighted Latina lesbians, the Colombian-born tatiana nurtured a community of Latina lesbian and queer writers in Los Angeles. A decade after her death from cancer in 2012, her work was anthologized in Redonda y radical: antología poética de tatiana de la tierra and published in Colombia by Sincronía Press. 

Queer myself, I marveled at Manrique and tatiana. I certainly had the start of a literary lineage even if it was not the one my tias had envisioned.

Then, in 2010, Patricia Engel burst onto the literary scene with her short story collection Vida. Her debut chronicled an irreverant girl’s coming of age here in the United States and was followed by three novels including Infinite Country, which became a New York Times bestseller.   

Now the last six years has witnessed what might be described as a mini-boom in Colombian American fiction—works written in English by Colombian American writers in the United States. These include novels by María Alejandra Barrios Vélez, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Julián Delgado Lopera, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Juan Martinez, Melissa Mogollon, and Sergio de la Pava. Some are immigrants, and some are the children of immigrants. Contreras’s stunning memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was named a finalist for the Pulitzer in memoir in 2023.​

At the same time, Colombian writers whose works were once only available in Spanish have had their novels translated into English including María Ospina's short stories Variations on the Body and Gloria Susana Esquivel’s novel Animals at The End of the World. Pilar Quintana is a Brown University professor whose fiction has long been celebrated in Colombia, but only in the past five years have two of her novels—The Bitch and Abyss—been translated to English. Both were finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. 

To some degree, this new literature may speak to demographic changes. There are now more than 1.4 million Colombians living in the United States—a 183 percent increase since 2000. In New York City alone, they constitute the fourth largest Latinx immigrant group. 

But this new literature is also a result of changes underway in Colombia’s literary world. The 2018 anthology Puñalada trapera proved to be groundbreaking, bringing together for the first time contemporary writers both in the country and in its diaspora (I was honored to have my work included).  In Choco, which is home to Colombia’s Black communities, author Velia Vidal founded Motete, an educational and cultural organization, and the Chocó Reading and Writing Festival (FLECHO). In 2024, Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex and Motete initiated a program for writers from the Midwest and Colombia to be in conversation. 

To recognize and also interrogate this new rise of Colombian fiction, I along with my colleagues at Northwestern University, Sarah Schulman and Juan Martinez, organized and hosted the 2025 Colombian Writers Symposium. With generous funding from the Department of English, the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Kaplan Humanities Institute, and the Spanish and Portuguese Department, we were able to bring Gloria Susana Esquivel from Bogotá to discuss her novel Animals at The End of the World. In conversation with her were Julián Delgado Lopera, whose forthcoming novel Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You had its cover reveal online with People magazine, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva who joined us from the book tour for her new book of short stories Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!

What emerged were conversations about what it means to write about Colombia today from three new voices, and our students met with each writer to discuss their work, their homelands, and thecharacters that haunt them. Here are excerpts from those conversations. 

– Daisy Hernández

***

An Interview with Julián Delgado Lopera: author of Fiebre Tropical

By Sydney Gaw and Sahana Unni

Having emigrated to the United States from Colombia at age 15, how do you think your background has shaped both your writing and your activism?

It's impacted my writing and my life a lot. I feel like the one event that changed the course of my life forever was moving to the United States, because I had grown up knowing the world in a specific way, and then I was  thrown into a very different world, a different language, a different way of existing, different cultural codes. One of the things about being in Miami that really shaped my writing was the Spanglish, which is an element that is very much part of how I write.

Miami really shaped how I understood language. I had grown up only speaking Spanish with people who spoke Spanish, and all of a sudden I was in this place where people were mixing both languages, where they were first generation, second generation, third generation, people who had just gone there. And people were being very playful with the ways that they were using language. And that was very attractive to me. And it was very attractive to me because when I was going to high school, I couldn't access the kind of correct English that I was being asked for. But when I would go to the hair salon or the grocery store, the way that people were speaking was so much more accessible, and I thought it was very creative. 

In a recent Instagram post, you wrote that the “language and literature that’s felt true to [your] soul has always been created from a liminal space.” Can you tell us more about that liminal space?

I've lived in immigrant neighborhoods since I moved to the US. I lived in San Francisco for a long time, in Miami, and I lived in New York.  I love to walk around and see the signs on the stores and restaurants, because usually people will translate the grammar from their native tongue into English and just write it out like that in any language. I always find that fascinating, because it sounds so beautiful to me. It just sounds different, right? Like it has kind of a different tone to it. 

I also picked up a lot of language when I got to San Francisco. At the drag clubs, I was assisting my best friend at the time who was a drag queen, and we were twenty years old, and I was coming in all these nights to help do her hair and her padding and stuff like that. And so I was listening to people — to the queens speaking in English and Spanish, because he was at a Latino bar. And drag queens have no concern for grammar. They just want to be sassy, on point and funny. There's a lot of dark humor, there's a lot of campiness, but they don't really care about being grammatically correct. That liminal space is both these immigrant places where language is spoken differently, but also all these queer spaces, including drag clubs, my queer family.  I had a trans mother who's from Cuba, and I would spend a lot of time just in her house, and she came here when she was in her 20s, so her English was also very mixed with a lot of Cuban slang.

And so I have brought a lot of that into my own writing, and those are the liminal spaces that I think it's like, oh, you would never think that the way, like a transsexual who got here in the 1980s from Cuba — that that's like someone who can make it into high literature, right? Or like a drag club in a shitty part of San Francisco, like that language that is being spoken there, can make it into high literature. So that's why I call it liminal spaces.

How much of your novel Fiebre Tropical was inspired by your own life or experiences? What did it mean to share these insights through an intermixing of English and Spanish?

Fiebre was many things for me. It was the first time that I was trying to write a full length novel, which seems very daunting. I had only written short stories before, and I was getting my MFA at the time, and it all started as a short story. 

The book tells the story of a girl who moves from Bogota, Colombia to Miami with her mom and her grandmother and her sister  and the family joins the Evangelical Christian church. Then a lot of things happen.  

My family did move from over there to Miami. My mother did join the Evangelical Christian church. So there's a lot of it that was part of me trying to process some things that had happened in my life, and using some of my life kind of like auto fiction…And then I added a lot of meat that is just imagination.

It was an exploration of many things for me around craft. It was like, How can I sustain a narrative for 200 and something pages? How far can I take this use of Spanglish? How much can I get away with, I mean, and actually get this published?’ … I'm very interested in that dynamic between the two languages. And Fiebre was the first time that I was exploring and it was also a way for me to see and witness my own linguistic reality on the page. I speak both languages all the time, constantly, and so it was very much a way for me to be able to write something that reflected my own linguistic reality. And to be honest, that book was just very fun to me. It was just a really fun book to write. 

What made you decide to portray the characters in the way that you did, in particular, the main character, Francisca, and also characters like her grandmother, who is portrayed in a sympathetic light, while she's also dealing with a lot of other issues in the household?

It's mostly, ‘Where is the conflict? Where is the tension?’ Both the grandmother and the mother hold a lot of very matriarchal Colombian elements. There's a moment in the novel where they're just sighing and using silence as a weapon, and that's a very Colombian female thing to do — using silence as a way to kind of absorb all the energy in the room.

The mom becomes very faithful to the church,becomes very grateful to the church, because she is a new immigrant, and she has no other community and no other place to turn to. But Francisca doesn't really understand this. She's a teenager, and so I think that it's from a first person point of view, and so we're following her so closely, and I wanted to have places of tension with all of them, but also places of tension that were real for a teenager like, “I don't want to go to church. My mom doesn't really see me. I have this secret life that she doesn't know about.” And then the mom trying, in her own way to connect, but also being so absorbed with her own mental health issues and all the things that she's dealing with. And then the grandmother is very loosely based on mine. I had a very strong connection with my grandma, and she watches a lot of television, which I think happens to a lot of older people who move to the US and then just watch television in their own native language, which is also something that my grandmother did, and I'm also very fascinated with the way that Spanish television does in shaping a lot of immigrant experiences in the household, because that TV was on my house all the time with her listening to Spanish stuff.

I don't draft everything before writing. I write a lot, which sometimes I write myself into a wall because of it, but that's also how I explore what needs to happen in the narrative. 

You teach creative writing and contemporary Latine literature for college students. What is some of the advice that you give your students?

I don't believe you should wait for inspiration to come to you all the time when writing. I think writing is what I call a soft discipline — it is better to just continuously show up to your work, regardless of whether or not you feel inspired. Self discipline works better. 

Being in community with other people is essential to feeling nourished as a writer, not necessarily success. Success is a deep word, but feeling nourished as a writer, to me, means being in relationship to other people,  showing up to other people's readings, connecting with other folks, having an accountability buddy for your own writing. 

Then in your first drafts, just not editing yourself, not thinking about, “Is this really good?” …And really pay attention to revision. We hold certain myths as writers, that the genius writer just writes the first draft beautifully, and that we should all try to pursue being that genius writer whose first draft is incredible. But that's not really the way the creative process works. Writing sometimes is tedious and annoying, you know, and kind of leaning into that. So, have a first or second draft that is just as messy as you want it, and then you have something to shape, but it's really in the revision process that the writing takes a form. 

Do you have any personal writing habits that you swear by?

Yeah, I write in the morning. So that's another thing: paying attention to when you write best, and when your mind is at your best. I usually dance or sing before writing, because it puts my mind in a different place. I also like to read a little bit before writing. And so I read something that is connected to what I'm writing somehow. So maybe the voice, maybe the structure, maybe something about the plot. Then I try to — before going to the computer, because I think the blank page and the computer feels very daunting to me — write long hand on a pad. I sometimes process what I'm feeling, not necessarily the book itself. So, for instance, “Today I had to write about the mother and the father's relationship, but I think this is a piece of shit. I don't know if this is going anywhere. I don't know what to do.” Like, all of these feelings that I'm having, I actually process them out, which is also something that I tell my students. Then I actually go to the page and I feel like I'm a little bit lighter.

How has your writing and creative process changed since your debut novel? 

I thought it was gonna get easier. I was like, “Oh, I should have this streamlined.” I have talked to writers who are just like, “Yeah, and then I do this, and then I do this, and then I did this.” I was like, “Wow.” I'm a Gemini, an air sign and I'm very organized, but my process is very messy, and I just allow myself to have a very messy process.

I have a book coming out next year, and it took eight years to write. There were just so many times I was just like, “This is it. I'm done. That's it. I don't want to keep doing this.” But I am also very obsessive and stubborn, and I would finish a project even if it takes everything out of me. I think it changes when you now feel this need that I have to produce. I try to move away from that and just keep centering around the creativity aspect of it and the story aspect of it. But sometimes it's hard to not have all these things simultaneously in my head. That's why I keep going back to the beauty of that first, the debut novel. I think that there's a different kind of energy in it.

But now, I feel like I'm also exploring things that I didn't allow myself to explore before. Like I don't feel Fiebre is a very funny book. With the second one, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, there is some humor in it, but it's not all humor. I allowed myself to get a little darker, to get a little more poetic, and... I explored a lot around structure, so it's a braided narrative, which I think is really hard. I wouldn't suggest it. It's so hard, and it took me forever to try to figure it out, but I was like, “Okay, this will be fun. I'm gonna challenge myself.” It was so hard. I always try to just take on something that I'm challenging myself with.  I do feel like I've grown incredibly as a writer, and I'm still just like, ‘How does one do this? I don't know.’

Since you mentioned the forthcoming book, what you can tell us about that? About the process of writing it and what readers can look forward to?

So the book is called Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You. It's coming out with Norton in May, 2026.

It grew out of a short story. All of it happens in Colombia, and it's the story of this closeted kind of cross-dressing gay dad raising this girl. There's all this drama and horrible things that happen because he is closeted. And so we see him raising her with the help of some trans women, and then also we see him as a child in rural Colombia in the 1960s. I went to Colombia a couple of times to do research. That was really incredible. I got to talk to people there about the queer history and trans history of my own place, which was really beautiful.

And what people can expect is, like, it's very gay, it's very trans, and it's very long. I think it has a lot of humor, and it also is very sad. It's a very sad book, which I love. I love sad endings. One of the things that I wanted to do was understand why we need really encouraging and heroic gay writers to “get” gay books and queer books. And I also was nostalgic for the gay books in which people die and are horrific. And so I was like, “I'm gonna go back to our roots when we used to kill everybody off.” I think that there's something about the very, very deep sadness around queerness too. And I think that this book also explores that part. 

And this book, like your other works, also dives into domestic life and just everyday life in Bogota. So what can you tell us about the setting of this story?

This one is in the 90s. A lot of it happens in the apartment and in this trans nightclub, and then in the small town that is maybe four hours away from the capital.  Colombian  violence is very much at the edges. So, I try to bring in some of what's going on politically, but it's very minor, and it's all around the edges.  I grew up in the 90s there, so I was very much calling on things that felt very true to me around how the city smelled and felt. And there are certain things that can only happen in a place like Colombia during the 90s---one of which is the way that the buses are packed, the way that people talk on the streets, the things that people are selling to you on the streets, the music that's heard — all of that feels very much like that. 

Many of your works focus on the Latinx and queer experience. Given the current political climate surrounding these identities, what do you think is the role of authors in activism right now?

It is scary because I think the pushback right now has been incredibly harsh, and there's a lot of people who are getting censored. There's a lot of people who are losing their jobs, and at the same time, it really speaks to the power that books have, and the power that writing has to really change how we see the world. 

If you're asking me about what changed me and definitely shaped who I am — of course, through personal experience, through going to places — but reading has completely changed the person that I am, and how I see and experience other people. When I came to the US, I had only lived with Colombians before, I was only around Colombians, so I didn't know a lot about other cultures, and I didn't know how their people were experiencing the world the same way. And the way that I learned a lot about it was that I had friends from different places; I have friends from different races. But it was also reading, you know. It was in reading that I started to really understand, “Oh, this is what institutional racism looks like in the US, and it's because of slavery, and this is what happened.” I think that that is a way to just really come to understand the way that things are and to really challenge the status quo and white supremacy. And that's why it's so powerful. It's because it's constantly challenging what the current administration wants to hold onto so dearly, which is white supremacy. That's really the power of books. 

Sahana Unni is a sophomore nonfiction writer at Northwestern University, currently majoring in journalism and philosophy.

Sydney Gaw is a fiction writer and junior at Northwestern University majoring in Journalism, Creative Writing, and Asian American Studies.

Daisy Hernández is an essayist, memoirist, and journalist. Her work focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, immigration, class and sexuality. She is the author of the book Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth (Hogarth Press, 2026). She is also the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. The book was named a top 10 nonfiction book of 2021 by Time magazine and was a finalist for the New American Voices Award.