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In this interview, Angie Cruz discusses her literary mentors and creative process, the autobiographical aspects of her work, her complicated relationship to labels, and her thoughts on the future of Dominican-American literature.
SL : When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?
AC : It was a long process because I really didn't imagine myself as a writer as a young person. I didn't know any writers. There weren't any writers that I knew of in my family and I wasn't extremely scholastic. I went to La Guardia High School , a school for art and music, where I studied visual arts. At school we were not really required to do that many things academically and the books that we read were mostly by dead white men. So actually, I didn't read a book by a person of color until I went to school in Binghamton when I was twenty-one years old. That was really when the change happened in me where I felt like I could be part of a dialogue. When I began to read works by writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and slave narratives, it was then that I started to see myself in the world of literature and even thinking that I could possibly participate in that dialogue. It took a while.
SL : Before you studied at SUNY Binghamton you also attended the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. I've read in several interviews that you started to study fashion because of Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta. Could you elaborate on that?
AC : When I was graduating from high school my grades weren't so great and I knew I had to go to college. My family is a family that emigrated from the Dominican Republic with a lot of ambition for their children. I was expected to go to college. And what are the choices living in New York City if your grades are below average? You go to community college or you try to find a skill. So I tried to find a skill. I knew how to sew and I knew how to draw so I thought fashion design could be a good path for me. In some ways, even...