Isabel Quintero

Isabel Quintero is a Mexican-American writer that composes young adult literature, poetry and fiction.

Quotes

 * This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…
 * On the absence of people of color in her school curriculums in “‘My Writing is My Activism’: An Interview with Isabel Quintero” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017 Feb 1)


 * It’s easier for me to point out what makes bad literature: forced language, too much description, poor word choice, writing things just for shock value, shitty plots, clichés, lack of research, lazy writing, people who are trying to write “diversely” for the sake of diversity. Good literature is the opposite of that…
 * On what defines good writing in “‘My Writing is My Activism’: An Interview with Isabel Quintero” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017 Feb 1)


 * It is an American story. And it’s a Mexican story. I’m the child of immigrants. Being the child of immigrants is always this liminal space of, where do I fit in? It is complex. And the older I get, the more complex it becomes. I was born here. What I celebrate is the America that I grew up in—it’s very brown, it’s very Mexican…
 * On her book My Papi Has a Motorcycle in “Q & A with Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña” in Publishers Weekly (2019 May 9)


 * Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad; at least the having multiple ways of looking at life-the Mexican and American/the male and female. Where that goes awry is when we want to make one way of approaching life, The One Way. That’s where things begin to disintegrate, loyalties are questioned, and patriarchies are born…
 * On the Mexican American experience in “2015 Morris Award: An Interview with Finalist Isabel Quintero” in YALSA (2015 Jan 26)

Quotes about Isabel Quintero

 * More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin.
 * Kathleen Alcalá Interview