#literary-criticism

#literary-criticism

"A writer," Saul Bellow once observed, "is a reader moved to emulation." But what if it's also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading-and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.

That Cummins' Puerto Rican grandmother should come into this discussion seems very much a product of the heated cultural moment into which American Dirt was published.