On Feb. 11, two-time Pura Belpré Award Winning Author Jasminne Mendez came for an author visit in the library to visit during DEN. During her visit, she opened by performing a poem that she wrote when she was 19 after her first trip back to the Dominican Republic.

“I have many more feelings about the island now that I better understand its history,” Mendez said. “It’s background and my own culture.”

Mendez went on to talk about her experience growing up Dominican in the south.

“It was definitely challenging not really growing up around any other Afro-Latinos aside from my cousins,” Mendez said. “I sort of rejected being black because it was rejected by everyone else. Black people always told me that I was not black enough, and Latinos told me that I was not Latina enough, so I would always just say, I’m Dominican, and that’s just where it landed until much later.”

Mendez’s books, Islands Apart: Becoming Dominican American and Island of Dreams, describe some of the sentiments she felt about her identity at the time. 

“In my first book, Island of Dreams, you can see that even I myself did not identify as black in some of those parts,” Mendez said. “But in my 20s, in college, as I started doing more poetry, performances, open mics and writing poems about my identity, I really came to a place of loving my culture, my heritage, my background and just owning the label of Afro-Latina which is not something that I even heard of until my mid-twenties.”

Mendez talked about how seeing her idol, Maya Angelou, inspired her at a young age.

“I saw her perform some of her poems in Tennessee when I was 11,” Mendez said. “At the end of her performance everybody stood up and applauded, and in that moment, all I thought was ‘I want to do that. I want to read poems for a living.’ I wanted my voice, my stories and my presence to make that kind of a difference.” 

Mendez’s first experience in performing was in school when she did theatre, and even though her theatre career continued after high school, she was unable to keep performing.

“I was 22 at the time, getting diagnosed with multiple chronic autoimmune diseases, which really curtailed and changed my direction in life,” Mendez said. “I decided I was going to teach, and I was going to take kids to one act, and that was going to be my claim to fame.”

Teaching became difficult for her after she experienced near heart failure at 27 years old. While recovering, she put together her first collection of poetry essays, which became her first book Isle of Dreams. Her writing career continued with the newest of her seven works being Story of My Anger, which was inspired by her experience as a member of the Libro Traficantes activist group in 2017, who trafficked books back to Arizona after ethnic studies was banned. 

“We took a bus and traveled from Texas to Arizona to get these books back into the hands of students and teachers and set up underground libraries throughout different cities,” Mendez said. “I was on the bus for part of the trip, and I read and shared poems in support of the movement.”

Mendez shared some of her advice as a writer at her visit.

“I always tell young people that if you have a story to tell, you should tell it,” Mendez said. “If you don’t, someone else will do it for you, and they’re going to get it wrong. Unfortunately, that is a lot of what is happening in our world today. Other people’s stories are being told for them or about them, and they are oftentimes blatant lies.” 

According to Mendez, it is important to her that she tells authentic stories. 

“I had sensitivity readers for two of my books, Aniana Del Mar Jumps In and The Story of My Anger,” Mendez said. “Because I had LGBTQ characters, I wanted to be sure that I was handling those characters in those storylines with the right amount of empathy and understanding and not caricature or stereotypes.”

Mendez then opened up the floor for a brief Q&A in which students were able to ask more questions about her life story and overall writing advice. 

“My motivation comes from realizing that growing up, I didn’t read a single Dominican author until I was in college,” Mendez said. “My motivation comes from doing these kinds of events and seeing young people who look like me, who have similar backgrounds. I’m writing the things that they can see themselves represented in, and that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning to keep writing these stories. It’s knowing that there’s not enough of the stories that I have to tell already out there in the world, and so I have to keep writing them.”

Junior Natalie Nguyen is involved in Page Turners, which is a book club in the school. She said she had not heard of Mendez prior to her visit.

“I like hearing other people’s opinions and voices,” Nguyen said. “Sometimes they have advice that I find interesting as a young writer. It’s really interesting to hear people talk about things that they’re passionate about.”

The Library’s proceeds from the book fair were used to cover the event. 

“This year, with all the new renovations in the library, we didn’t really need things like new desks and shelves,” librarian Keri Burns said. “So we talked to the students about what they wanted to do with the proceeds, and an author visit was what they most wanted and most enjoy.”

Burns met Mendez at the Texas Book Festival back in November.

“We talked to her, and she was just so nice and really wonderful,” Burns said. “I asked her if she would be down for a visit because I just knew that her book was amazing, and the way that she speaks, the way that she writes, she’s a poet. I knew that it would have something for everybody, and so many students would enjoy it, so I asked her and she was willing.”

There have been various other author visits such as Becky Dean who is an up-and-coming local author. 

“Too often as a society, we trivialize fiction and we say it’s like a silly, frivolous, fun thing, but really, reading promotes empathy,” Burns said. “It opens your eyes to worlds that are not your own and experiences that you may not have ever had. It can also make you feel seen and feel heard by seeing experiences that you’ve also gone through. I want kids to feel like careers in authorship and careers in publishing are attainable, but also that books and reading are very important.”

At the conclusion of the visit, select students received copies of some of Mendez’s books and had the opportunity to have their book signed.

“She has such a heart for young adults, and I really think when you have somebody that has spent their entire career giving back to teens and young adults, it comes through not only in their writing, but in the way that they interact with people,” Burns said. “Listening to her talk to our students after the visit and asking them genuine questions as she was signing their books and really hearing their answers, she is just so genuine and so dynamic. She really writes and speaks from the heart.”