Our guest this episode is Luisana Duarte Armendáriz, who is a doctoral student concluding her studies at UConn this spring. She is already an accomplish author of children’s literature and is a graduate assistant in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English. She has had an incredible variety of experiences in her life, ranging from graphic designer to high school teacher to an acceptance to medical school. She started writing children’s books when applying for graduate school and has written “Julieta and The Diamond Enigma” with its sequel “Julieta and The Cryptic Rose” set for release in the fall. Before we get started with Luisana, we talked about Izzy’s experience covering the NCAA Men’s Final Four for University Communications.
Listen to Episode 161 on Podbean
Mike: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with my co-host Izzy Harris from University Communications. Hello, Izzy. Welcome back from the Hoosier State. Thank you.
Izzy: What a whirlwind couple of days.
Mike: Izzy was representing University Communications, doing a great job at the men’s Final Four as the men made it all the way to the championship game. Tell us a little bit about your experience out there and the kind of work you were doing.
Izzy: Yeah, so I was working a lot with alumni and fans, so Husky Nation, everyone was super excited, lots of smiling faces. I do a lot of running around trying to get the best of the best reactions and things like that. Everyone by the end of the trip was pointing me out, asking me to take their picture, knew exactly what to do for the camera. All the content came out wonderful because Husky Nation is so awesome. Everyone is so welcoming. I always say it feels like I leave with new friends after I go on a trip like this because everyone is just so welcoming. People invite me to eat with them and on the airplane and invite me to sit down with them and even eat at the airport. It was super nice.
Mike: That’s great.
Izzy: I love the experience. It’s really fun for what I do as a videographer, just to kind of get outside of my comfort zone a little bit and do things that I don’t normally do. So, although it wasn’t an outcome that we wanted, I still give it a thumbs up.
Mike: That’s great. I’m glad you had that experience and you did a great job. The products on social media and everything were just terrific, so nice job.
Izzy: Thank you. Yeah, everyone here did a great job too. It’s a lot of back and forth between Indianapolis and Phoenix and Storrs, and we’re all in different places, and yet we come up with this amazing content, so everyone should be really proud.
Mike: So, our guest today on the UConn 360 Podcast is Luisana Duarte Armendáriz. She has an incredibly impressive background. She’s a native of Mexico and she’ll earn her doctorate from UConn this spring. As we start our countdown to Commencement, it’s hard to believe we’re already there. She’s served as a graduate assistant in our creative writing program in the Department of English, but she has had an incredible variety of experiences in her life. She’s been a graphic designer, a high school teacher. I understand she was accepted to medical school at one point. But what she’s really been doing lately is writing children’s books and picked up on that when she was applying to graduate school. She’s written one book so far, Julieta and the Diamond Enigma. It’s a chapter-style book for children and she’s going to tell us a little bit about that. And there’s a sequel on its way, Julieta and the Cryptic Rose, which is going to come out this fall. For the first book, she won the 2018 Lee & Low Books New Visions Award. She holds two master’s degrees from Simmons College in Boston and her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at El Paso, UTEP as it’s known. So, go Miners.
Luisana: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Mike: So, tell us a little bit about growing up in Mexico and it sounded like your love of reading, which turned into your love of writing, was ingrained in you at a very young age.
Luisana: Yeah, absolutely. I think I had a very unique growing up experience because I grew up on the border of Mexico and the U.S. in Ciudad Juárez, which borders El Paso, Texas. And to explain how close it is, I love using Boston, which I spent some time in. So, it’s as close as Cambridge and Boston, except our river has less water because we’re in a desert.
Mike: That’s the Rio Grande, right?
Luisana: Yes, that is.
Mike: That was pretty good.
Izzy: Yeah, that is a good comparison.
Mike: Little geography.
Luisana: And we call it Río Bravo as well, which is where the Bravos are now the soccer team in Juárez. But yeah, so I grew up basically in between two worlds, and I think that has been a theme in my life because I was able to get reading materials from both Mexico and in Spanish, and my mom was very adamant about making us readers. So, I would also get to go to the libraries in El Paso. Reading has been a big part of my life since I was young. My grandfather used to ask me all the time, what are you reading now, and he would recommend books and share poetry with me. But my mom used to do this thing, which I didn’t like at the moment, but I am very grateful to her for that now. She used to make us read 30 minutes before allowing us to watch TV, which sounded like torture before, but now it’s one of the things that I’m most grateful to her for, that she made me a reader, because that informed my life and now it’s what I get to do.
Izzy: So, you’ve certainly had a number of experiences in life before becoming an author. What are some of them and how do those experiences shape you into who you are today?
Luisana: So, you mentioned, Mike, that I had an acceptance to medical school. So, I actually got accepted to a school in Guadalajara. I stayed in Mexico and I think I actually went there, didn’t go to any classes, but was enrolled. And a couple of days before the semester started, I was outside of the university offices, and I realized that if I start doing med school immediately, because in Mexico you go into med school, architecture school, and law school immediately, you don’t need a bachelor’s before that.
Mike: Oh, interesting.
Luisana: So, I realized if I start doing this now, this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life. So, I had a sort of panic moment and decided to go back to Juárez and ended up doing my bachelor’s in El Paso because I appreciated that you had to do a core curriculum and get a breadth of different disciplines before you decided what you wanted to do. So that was one of the things that really changed my life, because I was very much going to go into med school, be a doctor, and that was going to be my life. So, I took a year off in between, two years off in between high school and my bachelor’s, and my second year I did a missionary year in the Philippines as a Catholic missionary, and that was really one of the most formative experiences of my life. It was a hard year. It was a year full of challenges, but also one of the most rewarding years because it really made me someone who can adapt to a lot of situations and sort of built my work ethic, I would say.
Mike: So, we talked a little bit about your book. Tell us, who is Julieta, and what’s the first book about? Who’s it geared to? Who does it appeal to? And tell us a little bit about the sequel that’s coming out.
Luisana: Absolutely. So, I will correct me on the name. It’s Julieta with a J.
Mike: Oh, okay. So that’s, I missed that.
Luisana: No, it’s fine. That is one of the things that in the first pages of the first book, she makes sure to let readers know that that’s how you pronounce her name.
Mike: Say that one more time.
Luisana: Julieta. Yes. So, it’s the Spanish pronunciation. And I think this sort of begins to explain who she is because I have a hard name and I struggled growing up with a hard name and people gave me all kinds of nicknames or mispronunciations or changes in my name, and Julieta sort of gets rid of that trauma that I had. My editor, Stacy Whitman, suggested that I make sure that I inform readers how to pronounce her name, and she is sort of the person who maybe I wanted to be, but also has a lot of my characteristics. So, she loves Greek mythology, which I love. She loves art, which I loved. But she also is mischievous in a way that I wasn’t and gets to do a lot of rambunctious things that I didn’t get to do. So, at some point she jumps into a fountain in Versailles and I would never, never do that. So, I get to live sort of vicariously through her. She is a character who is spunky and very smart and loves to share with people her love for art and mythology. And yeah, that’s basically who she is, and she gets to travel the world and share her love for art.
Mike: And you have a sequel coming out?
Luisana: I do. So, Julieta and the Cryptic Rose is set in Guanajuato, which is a very old town, a silver mining town in central Mexico, and it’s full of ghost stories. One of the La Llorona versions comes from that town, and it also happens to be the birthplace of Diego Rivera, one of Mexico’s most famous painters and muralists. And she gets to go and sort of rescue some of Diego’s art. I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it. But she also gets to hang out with her cousins, and they are a rambunctious bunch, let’s call them.
Mike: So, what’s the age range for the reader on a book like this?
Luisana: The sweet spot is for ages 10 to 12. It’s very short chapters, so if you’re reading it to your kid, maybe they can be a little younger, but you’ll have to read it a couple of chapters a night.
Izzy: Can you tell us a little bit about what brought you to UConn and, as a doctoral student, tell us about your work here. What’s it like in the Creative Writing program?
Luisana: Absolutely. So, a couple of years before I started here, I was working as a dean of discipline in a boarding school in Michigan, and the boarding school catered to a lot of international students who wanted sort of an English immersion year in the U.S. But COVID came along and the international program was no more. So, they told us, thank you for participating, you get to go home. So, it was a hard moment in my life because I had to sort of pause and say, okay, this plan didn’t work out, what am I going to do now. And through taking time to think and just a pause, I realized that I had sort of been tricking myself into not going back to school, just pushing it off. And I realized that this is what I really want to do, become a teacher, because education is a very important part of my life and I do it in what I write and as my job. And I really wanted to do it at not only the high school level, but also at the university level.
I started applying to graduate programs and UConn said we’d love to have you, and that has been my life for the past five years. I’m about to finish, which is crazy. And through that time, I not only get to teach, I’ve taught in the first-year writing program, but I’ve also taught children’s literature classes and creative writing classes, young adult classes. I taught a class at the Neag School, which was really fun and sort of a different way of looking at children’s literature from the perspective of those who are in the elementary classroom.
And I’ve also been on the admin side of things and worked as a graduate assistant in the first-year writing program and early college experience program, and now in the creative writing program. And that, I mean, this is what I do, this is my work, but being on the admin side of things is a different experience. I’ve gotten to do a lot of poetry work, which I don’t usually do. I’ve gotten to work with other departments, especially with the Poetic Journeys program. So, if you take the buses on campus, you’ll see the Poetic Journeys posters on those buses, also in the library elevators. And I’ve gotten to work with students from the Design Center to design the poems in their visual representation. So, it has been an amazing year, full of challenges, but also a lot of rewarding experiences.
Mike: So, you’ve accomplished so much in your life already. When you finish your degree here at UConn, what does the future hold for you?
Luisana: That is the question, Mike. The question that I’m trying to answer right now. I’m on the job market looking for jobs. If anyone out there has a job for me, hit me up. But ideally, I would want to teach at a university. I’ll teach whatever, I’ll teach creative writing, I’ll teach first-year writing, I’ll teach English, whatever is available, I’ll teach. And of course I’ll continue writing. There are talks with my editors about at least two more Julieta books, and I have a couple of picture books that are sort of in the works, and a young adult novel that is set during the height of the war on drugs in Juárez and El Paso, which was a very bizarre experience because Juárez was considered the most dangerous city in the world, and El Paso was considered the safest city in the United States during those years. So, it was a very interesting dynamic environment.
Izzy: Alright, so to wrap things up here, what is on your summer reading list, and do you have any recommendations for our listeners?
Luisana: Absolutely. So, I am completing my final chapter, which is picture books and how language and translation work in picture books. So, I’m reading a lot of picture books. I have a couple of recommendations. A is for Bee by Ellen Heck, so it’s an ABC book that offers the letter in English but then gives you an animal that doesn’t fit the letter in English, but it does fit in other languages. So, you get a lot of connection to languages through that book.
And the other book that I will recommend on picture books is Drawn Together by Minh Lê and Dan Santat. It’s a very beautiful relationship between a boy and his grandfather. They don’t speak the same language, but they communicate through drawings. Beautiful book recommended one hundred percent.
And for pleasure, I am currently reading the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. I don’t usually read high fantasy, but these are very engaging books. And I am going through The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There are three books, I’m still on the first one. If you want something on the lighter side, I recommend The Day the Mona Lisa Vanished, which is a nonfiction book for middle graders and for adults. It was a very fun read by Nicholas Day.
Mike: What’s on your summer reading list, Izzy?
Izzy: Honestly, I haven’t gotten that far yet. It’s almost time for exams, so the only thing that I’m reading is a ton of stuff for my classes.
Mike: Oh, that’s right, you’re still taking grad classes?
Izzy: Yes, but I’m also graduating in May.
Luisana: Congratulations.
Mike: We have two graduates here. Congratulations to both of you. My summer reading list is to finish the six books I’m halfway through on my nightstand.
Izzy: Good idea.
Mike: Anyway, well thank you for joining us today on the UConn 360 Podcast. Luisana, thank you very much.
Luisana: Thank you for having me.
Mike: Great. Good luck in the future, and Izzy, great to have you home and we’ll catch you next time on the UConn 360 Podcast.