Thank you.
It is the first Latino Pura Belpré honor.
I don't want to be quoted as claiming the actual medal,
but thank you so much.
And I just want to thank the Poetry
Center and the foundation.
This has been the most amazing experience.
I want to thank the schools that are hosting me.
The students today at Davis Elementary
were amazing they welcomed me with a mariachi band,
and tomorrow, I've heard that some of the secondary students
will arrive in costume.
So this is really a creative community, and it's exciting.
Finding the poetry in history is a process of exploration,
and it seems to me that over and over,
no matter what I set out to write,
I end up discovering things about myself
as well as the subject that I'm exploring.
And I also find that I come back to certain themes,
in particular, aspects of freedom.
I could sit down to write a book about search and rescue
dogs, which I have done, and somewhere in there, there'll
be something about freedom.
Whether social, emotional, or spiritual, I always
seem to explore that theme and one of hope,
and I think that these are subjects that are universal.
So even though all except for the last of these verse novels
are set in Cuba, I hope that students here,
for instance, in Arizona that may not
be very familiar with Cuba will still
find universal themes in there despite the different
geography.
My connection to the history of Latin America in general
and Cuba in particular is profoundly personal.
My American father traveled to the island
after seeing National Geographic photographs of my mother's
hometown, Trinidad de Cuba, which
is on the south central coast.
I won't tell you how long ago, but they've
been married 66 years.
And even though they did not speak the same language,
they fell in love at first sight.
He arrived on Valentine's Day, and as artists,
they used sketches, passing sketches back and forth to get
to know each other, because they didn't-- my father is American.
He only knew English.
My mother's Cuban.
She only knew Spanish.
I was born and raised in my father's hometown, Los Angeles,
California, but we spent summers in Cuba as often as possible,
where I developed a deep bond with my extended family
and also a lifelong passion for tropical nature, which
inspired me to go on to become a botanist and agronomist.
And I fell in love with the mystery of the island's past.
I was always curious about everything
having to do with Cuba, which leads
me to read history, which in turn inspires
me to write about history.
During one of our summer visits to Cuba when I was a child,
diplomatic relations between the island and the US broke down.
That was in 1960, but after the 1962 Missile Crisis,
travel was completely forbidden.
When I was a teenager, it was easier for an American citizen
to walk on the moon than to visit relatives in Cuba.
So one day, I had a huge extended family,
and the next day, my abuelita and bisabuelita
were as far out of reach as if they were on a distant planet.
But I always wondered about the lives of my primos, my cousins,
and I wondered what my own life would have been like if we had
settled in my mother's homeland instead of my father's.
And since this presentation is not in Los Angeles,
I will admit that I hated growing up in Los Angeles,
and I thought it was the worst place in the world, which
probably all teenagers say, right?
And I just like, why can't we live in Cuba?
Why do we have to live here?
And I'm sure that my cousins in Cuba were probably saying,
oh wow, why can't we live in Los Angeles?
How come she's the only one who gets to go there?
So the grass is always greener, but even today,
after returning to the island many times as an adult,
I still feel a sense of surrealism
or, if we're going to talk about Latin
America, of magic realism.
And that's why I choose poetry, because I
feel that it's a suitable vessel for the complex personal,
emotional riddles of history.
I started writing poetry as a young child
and then went on to study botany and agronomy
and did a lot of technical writing
but never completely gave up poetry.
I just gave up showing my poetry to other people,
which I think is very common for teenagers,
but they're secretly writing and learning
and will eventually come out and show it to people again.
I think that my experience with the timing of the Missile
Crisis, which was when I was 11, is
one reason that I choose to write for young readers
and in particular for preteens and teenagers,
because I like the difficult subjects.
I don't want to avoid them.
I want to explore them.
It's part of my general attitude of wanting to explore,
and maybe that is from my scientific background,
that I do like to experiment.
I want to face up to these troubling situations
and difficult decisions, and I hope
that the courage and the kindness
of real-life unknown heroes from history, well,
either unknown or forgotten, that I write about
will eventually help to inspire some of the young readers
as they struggle to make their own hopeful
decisions in situations that might seem hopeless,
whether it's a historical situation or a personal one.