The Dominican Writers Conference

Last May, something happened in New York City that doesn't happen enough.

Dominican writers filled the rooms. Not as guests. Not as tokens. As the main event.

For two days at John Jay College, we talked about our stories with the seriousness they deserve. About craft. About publishing. About what it costs to write in a language that wasn't always yours. About migration, memory, girlhood, grief, and what we carry from the island into every sentence we write.

We grieved in workshops. We laughed until the room shook. We sat in the front row while @writerjalvarez reminded us that Dominican stories don't just belong in American literature, they helped build it.

And then we went home and kept writing.

This is what it looks like when a community decides its stories matter. When writers who have been told to shrink, to translate themselves, to make their work more palatable, choose not to. When we gather not to ask for a seat at the table but to build one of our own.
DWC 2026 was that table.

We are already building what comes next.