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John Manuel Arias

Biography

John Manuel Arias

John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland Magazine and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn, New York, and San José, Costa Rica, with his grandmother and four ghosts. WHERE THERE WAS FIRE is his debut novel.

John Manuel Arias

Books by John Manuel Arias

Where There Was Fire
by John Manuel Arias - Fiction

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s family is changed forever. Now, 27 years later, Teresa and her daughter, Lyra, are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.