Marcia Mickelson

My parents left their native country of Guatemala during a thirty-six year civil war and brought me, as an infant, to the United States. We were undocumented and did not speak the language. I learned English in elementary school, quickly acquiring a great love of books. Reflecting back at all of those books that I immersed myself in, I don’t recall ever reading any books with characters who looked like me. They didn’t have my brown skin, my curly, fizzy hair, my Spanish-speaking parents, or my immigration status. This glaring omission in books, ranging from picture books to young adult books I devoured in high school, reinforced in me the false narrative that perhaps I didn’t belong in books.

When I started writing women’s fiction, I wrote what I had been consuming my entire life—other people’s experiences and life stories. It was not until my fifth book, that I finally realized that I deserved to be represented in books too. All people deserve to see their lives and experiences represented in media.

It is with this newfound understanding that a life-long deprivation of books mirroring my experiences falsely guided my writing, I resolved to make a change. I wrote Where I Belong, an experience that required me opening my heart and spilling it onto a page. I wrote a fictional account of a young woman, Millie, whose family came, undocumented, to the United States. With this desire to tell stories of young women of Guatemalan descent, came a resolve to focus on young adult literature. I am, in a way, transfixed on this part of my life when, as a young girl, I didn’t have any books that reflected my life and experience. There was such a void of this type of literature during my formative teenage years, and I often wonder how the presence of such books could have enriched my life. Even as diverse literature for young adults has become more prevalent in recent years, I am still eager to offer parts of my Guatemalan culture in my books. I have gone on to create Sarah in The Weight of Everything and Maya in the upcoming The Writing Room. Both of these young women have Guatemalan mothers. It has become my goal to continue including Guatemalan characters in the children’s literature I create. My focus now is solely on literature for young people, as I hope to contribute my small part in ensuring that all young people can see themselves reflected in the pages of the books they consume.