Contreras, Ingrid Rojas

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s the author of the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. Rojas Contreras was raised amid the political violence of the 1980s and ‘90s in Colombia. The house bustled with her fortune-telling mother’s clients. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets” – the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. Mami, the first woman to inherit the secrets, was just as powerful. But for Rojas Contreras, all this was someone else’s legacy, not hers. Until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, she suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to her power. Interweaving family stories, Colombian history, and Rojas Contreras’ deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir (Doubleday) is a testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.