Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Anon, in gratitude to all those people, often unacknowledged, sometimes unbeknownst, who have given me help, love, and support, throughout my life, on and off the page, beginning with the oral storytellers of my early childhood in the Dominican Republic, whose stories came with me into English, stories steeped in the rhythms of Spanish with splashes of sunlight and filled to the brim and spilling over the brim with the wild excesses that encourage generosity of heart above all things. The homeland that never quits giving.

To my sisters who first listened to my poems in our shared darkened bedrooms, reciting them to me decades later when I’d forgotten I’d written them, who at times have fought with me about what I could and couldn’t write, thereby keeping me and themselves honest and forcing my hand (literally) to be true to what I was willing to hurt for. What gratitude, I know! But thank you, ’Manitas, the one gone and two present, siempre unidas.

To my teachers, oh so many, some of them I never met, writers whose work I adore, whose book covers I have caressed to fadedness, whose words I have committed to memory. The living as well as the never-dead, the Ms. Stevensons and Mr. Packs, the David Huddles and William Merediths, and the writer friends, in whose shadows I have stood and still stand: the glorious Gloria Naylor, the intrepid Sandra Cisneros, the empathic and heart-swelling Helena María Viramontes, and the old-soul “youngsters,” Edwidge Danticat, Angie Cruz, Manuel Muñoz, Liz Acevedo. I am forgetting many of you, but I remember you where and when it counts: every time I sit down to write and your guardian spirits stand by, righting my writing with your consejos and with the example of your own magnificent books.

To my fierce and generous agents/angels, Susan Bergholz and Stuart Bernstein, who have helped open and widen the way, not just for my work but for that of so many others. Without your fierce encouragements, Susan, I would not have undertaken the daunting task of daring to find a spot on the shelf of American literature. And without your faith in my work, Stuart, from the early sonograms of rough drafts, to the fully formed final (never say final!) proofs, I could not have written my recent books. You hear me better than I hear myself. Gracias abounding.

To my editors, whose voices and marking pens live in my heart, beginning way back with Shannon Ravenel, Andrea Cascardi, Erin Clarke, Bobbie Bristol, and now Amy Gash, whose questions and queries challenge me to understand and clarify what the story and its characters need and demand. And to all my publishing familia at Algonquin Books, starting way back with Peter and Carolan Workman (los abuelos), Elisabeth Scharlatt (la madrina), the amazing Michael McKenzie (the fun tío), Betsy Gleick (ama de casa, keeping us all in line), and to so many others whose work on my books might be “invisible,” even to me, because—though they make every aspect of my books happen, they disappear, leaving no fingerprints, like fairies vanishing at the first light of publication.

To my cousin, aka “mi Google dominicano,” Juan Tomás Tavares, author, activist, critic, thinker, cultural entrepreneur, who keeps me informed on matters in our homeland and beyond and who always and generously answers all my questions and indulges my curiosity, including traipsing through cemeteries and lighting up borders: immeasurable gracias.

To Papi, who never lost faith in his storytelling daughter, however quiet his support, as per his habits in the Underground, and whose own story is not at all the anguished, haunted one told by the fictional Papi in this novel.

To Bill, who has made the life that feeds the work (and the writer) possible. My North Star, and when the skies are too cloudy to see, the hand that touches mine, comforts and guides me.

And to all of you, mostly invisible and anonymous readers, without whom all my stories would have ended up in Alma’s cemetery, thank you for the resurrections you have given and continue to give my books by reading them and using them to fertilize the ground your own creations spring from.