About the Book

When the Ground Turns In Its Sleep

Nítido Amán knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn’t know where, or why his family left. Raised in the United States by his immigrant parents, he never asked them about his homeland as a child—and they never talked about it. When Nítido loses his father to Alzheimer’s disease, his despondent mother, the sole bearer of a past long kept secret from her son, grows increasingly silent. Nítido realizes that his only links to the past are disappearing. So he travels to Guatemala, against his mother’s wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself.

Seeking answers, Nítido travels to Guatemala against his mother’s wishes. Upon his arrival in the small town of Río Roto, he is mistaken for the new priest, and decides to play the part. From his parishioners, he catches tantalizing and frightening glimpses of the buried history he’s aching to know. In a place shrouded in secrets, Nítido is at once determined and frightened to unearth the unnamed horrors it has seen.

About the Author

Sylvia Sellers-García was born in Boston and grew up in the United States and Central America. A graduate of Brown University and a Marshall scholar at Oxford, she has interned at Harper’s and worked at The New Yorker; her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at the University of California, Berkeley.

About the Guest Interviewer

Ada Vilageliu-Diaz was born in the Canary Islands, Spain, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English Philology and a Diploma de Estudios Avanzados in American Literature from the University of La Laguna. From 2001 to 2002, she taught Spanish at the University of New Mexico’s Continuing Education and worked at the National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico as a Spanish cultural and language assistant. She later moved to Washington, D.C., to pursue a Ph.D. in African American literature and was awarded a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship (SYLFF) which allowed her to travel to Haiti and Puerto Rico to conduct research for her dissertation. In March 2007, she was inducted into the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University. While a graduate student, she was chair and co-founder of Howard University’s International Graduate and Professional Support Group and coordinated the first international film festival at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She currently teaches writing at Howard University’s Department of English where she recently obtained a Ph.D. in African American, Caribbean and Latino literature and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. She volunteers with Para Eso La Palabra, an organization that promotes Latino literature and social justice, and participates in La Trenza: Rebraiding my Grandmother’s Hair, a leadership program for 21st century Latinas. Her poetry has been published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.