Jasmine Warga on the Relationship Between Language and Her Hyphenated Identity

Each week on NewberyTart, Jennie and Marcy, two book-loving mamas (and a librarian and a bookseller, respectively), read and drink their way through the entire catalogue of Newbery books, and interview authors and illustrators along the way.

In this episode, Marcy and Jennie talk to Jasmine Warga, author of the Newbery Honor Book Other Words for Home.

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From the episode:

Jasmine: For so long I was really afraid of my hyphenated identity. I thought that it was something that was broken about me and that I had to choose between the different parts of myself. And it’s from language that I’ve kind of healed that and I’ve learned that there’s strength in all these different parts of myself and learning how to put them together. And so I think that my story as well, some of them engage more directly with the idea of identity than others are always interested in that question of how do we use language to make sense of ourselves and how do we use language to carve out a reality that makes sense when the world can feel baffling and when we can feel like we don’t fit in?

I think I am always writing from an outsider perspective, but I think so many of us that turned to writing in vertigo that turned to writing for young people. It’s because when we were young person, we had so, so many of these types of questions about how do we fit into the world?

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Jasmine Warga’s is the author of the middle grade novel Other Words for Home as well as the teen novels My Heart and Other Black Holes, which has been translated into over 20 languages, and Here We Are Now. She lives and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio.