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Jamie Figueroa

Biography

Jamie Figueroa

Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, which was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next pick, a "Good Morning America" must-read book of the month, and was named a most anticipated debut of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions and Rumpus.

A member of the faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa has published writing in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times and the Boston Review, among other publications. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

Jamie Figueroa

Books by Jamie Figueroa

Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico
by Jamie Figueroa - Memoir, Nonfiction

Growing up in the Midwest, raised by a Puerto Rican mother who was abandoned by her family, Jamie Figueroa and her sisters were estranged from their culture, consumed by the whiteness that surrounded them. In MOTHER ISLAND, Figueroa traces her search for identity as shaped by and against a mother who settled into the safety of assimilation. She recalls a childhood in Ohio in which she was relegated to the background of her mother’s string of failed marriages; her own marriage in her early 20s to a man twice her age; how her work as a licensed massage therapist helped her heal her body trauma; and how becoming a mother has reshaped her relationship to her family and herself. Only as an adult in New Mexico was Figueroa able to forge her own path, using writing to recast her origin story.

Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer
by Jamie Figueroa - Fiction

In the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother's passing, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. Seeing her brother, Rafa, careening toward a place of no return, Rufina devises a bet: If they can make enough money performing for privileged tourists in the plaza over the course of the weekend to afford a plane ticket out, Rafa must commit to living. If not, Rufina will make her peace with Rafa's own plan for the future, however terrifying it may be. As the siblings reckon with generational and ancestral trauma, set against the indignities of present-day prejudice, other strange hauntings begin to stalk these pages.