Marisel Vera

Marisel Vera is the author of If I Bring You Roses, about a Puerto Rican couple who migrates to Chicago during Operation Bootstrap. She won the Willow Review literary magazine’s fiction prize for her short stories “The Liberation of Carmela Lopez” (2000) and “Shoes for Cuba” (2003). The setting of Vera’s The Taste of Sugar (Liveright) is Puerto Rico 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roaming the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. But after the devastation brought about by the Spanish-American War and the San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of other puertorriqueños, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii —another US territory—and the realities behind America’s promises of prosperity. Puerto Rican author Ivelisse Rodriguez (Love War Stories) called The Taste of Sugar “an important contribution to Puerto Rican literature by chronicling the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, the San Ciriaco hurricane, and the mass migration to Hawaii. Throughout, Vera captures the ‘trabajo y tristeza’ of the Puerto Rican people. Brava to Marisel Vera for telling our stories!”