Traces the challenges faced by four generations of a Dominican family after leaving their poverty-stricken country under the dictator, Trujillo, and arriving in Queens, New York, where the youngest son gains U.S. citizenship. 10,000 first printing."
The official version: I am a novelist, nonfiction author and journalist. My books are: "Muddy Cup: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America," which is nonfiction. "Exclusive: Reporters in Love...And War," a novel. And the forthcoming novel "Confidential Sources," which will be published in October 2006.
I was on staff at Newsday for about eight years in the eighties and have covered stories at home and abroad, specifically in Dublin, Belfast, the Dominican Republic, Mexico City, Guatemala and Hong Kong. During a writing career that began at the Midwood High School Argus in Brooklyn, New York circa 1970, my articles have also appeared in numerous other newspapers and magazines including the New Yorker, the New York Times (travel), Wigwag, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, Mademoiselle etc. In 1986 I won the Livingston Award for International Reporting for a series of Newsday articles that I later expanded for the book "Muddy Cup."
The version I've never written: The first thing I ever wanted to be was a torch singer. My mother, encouraging in most respects despite my portrayal of her fictional alter ego in "Exclusive," suggested that to succeed at this, it would be helpful if I could carry a tune. Acting was next but all my acting teachers had spoken to my mother. Or at least it seemed that way.
It wasn't until college that I considered writing as a career, although I had written my first short story at the age of nine. Fiction. It was about a child poisoned after she, quite purposefully, swallowed her grandmother's pills. When my mother saw that story I think she regretted her critique of my singing.
Some of the backstory: It wasn't until college at the State University of New York at Albany that I had the luck to find two teachers who told me that I could and, indeed, should write. They were William Rowley, an English Professor who, in 1974, ran the school's new journalism department and William Kennedy,a novelist and former journalist who would write the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Ironweed."
Inspired by them, I barged into the Saratogian, the Gannett Daily in Saratoga Springs, and "demanded" an (unpaid) internship.
About a decade and two newspapers later, feeling that I wanted to write works of more substance, I left daily journalism to try my hand at magazine stories. What I hoped is that someday I would write a book.
In 1997, 22 years after I got that student internship, I published my first book. "Muddy Cup." When I say that it is a work of narrative nonfiction, I mean that every word is true. Even the transitions are true. I've been a journalism professor at New York University and at Adelphi University and, as my former students know, I am a hard-liner on this subject. My garage is filled with the notebooks and tapes to prove it. There's nothing wrong with making up stories and I loved doing just that with my novels. But I make sure to call them novels - to tell readers that they are works of fiction
