Ethnicity and Craft: Creating Characters, not Caricatures

by
Jennifer De Leon
From the January/February 2015 issue of
Poets & Writers Magazine
12.16.14

A writer and editor shares her thoughts, as well as lessons learned from authors such as Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Celeste Ng, on writing of and from a culture that may be foreign to the reader: what do we explain, italicize, or translate? How do we navigate the divide between the ethnicity of a writer or character and that of her audience?