Recent works from Naima Coster, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Dantiel W. Moniz guttingly set to the page the burdens of coming of age as a person of color in the United States—and the onerous reckonings with race, injustice, and complicated, long-silenced family histories it can entail. They join to discuss charting their protagonists’ moral and psychological growth from youth to adulthood, and pushing against the boundaries of coming-of-age tropes.

Coster’s novel, What’s Mine and Yours, “portrays her characters’ worlds with startling vitality” (The New York Times) as it examines the outrage and anxiety that ensues when a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. In Quade’s The Five Wounds, the stunning expansion of a 2009 short story The New York Times called a “legitimate masterpiece,” five generations of a New Mexican family converge after making a dramatic discovery in their family history that reveals the trauma, redemption, and sacrifices of parenthood. Milk Blood Heat, Moniz’s “electrifying” debut short story collection whose “exhilarating and shocking and even healing” powers rest in its “veracity, vitality, and vulnerability” (The Washington Post) captures the lives of ordinary Floridians at the cusp of life’s inflection points as they confront waves of intense revelations that cross generations from young girls to grown men. Moderated by Brian Young, whose searing young adult debut novel about a courageous Navajo boy, Healer of the Water Monster, comes out this May.

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The 2021 PEN World Voices Festival convenes fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists to honor the art of the possible and the power of storytelling to push boundaries, challenge inherited narratives, and give voice to hope, courage, and survival. In a year when division and bloodshed have been fueled by hatreds based on race, ethnicity, and religion, the Festival celebrates resilience and courage, and summons the powers of the radical imagination and literature as gateways to reckoning and reconciliation.

Visit pen.org/festival to learn more about the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival.

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