SATA
ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: HIGH SPIRITS
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://cgtdesign.net
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
[Nationality is at least “American” but might also be “Dominican” (unclear)–though cultural identity is “Dominican American” (identified by one interviewer as “Afro-Dominican”)–so I left it blank. -MH]
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Maryland Institute College of Art, B.F.A. (graphic design and creative writing), 2019.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Designer, marketer, and writer. World Health Organization (WHO), Washington, D.C., graphic designer for Latin American health initiatives; Plantin (online magazine), founder and designer; became freelance graphic designer; Authentic Campaigns, Philadelphia, PA, political ad and campaign designer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]An author of young-adult fiction, Camille Gomera-Tavarez highlights experiences and issues especially familiar to Dominican Americans like her family and other members of the Caribbean diaspora. Her American hometown is in northern New Jersey. Speaking with Shannon Maughan of Publishers Weekly, she credited a particular course at the Maryland Institute College of Art with helping set her career trajectory. She remarked: “I took a Latin American literature class that focused on the ways that the literature related to artworks of the magical realism period. … And that was amazing. From the first day, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ” Speaking with e.E. Charlton-Trujillo for Las Musas, she elaborated: “I really found a piece of myself when I learned about Lo Real Maravilloso and its place in the canon of literature. It felt really powerful to free myself from the rules of western structures of storytelling. … If you visit the Caribbean and other places, stories like that are commonplace and taken as truth.” Among Gomera-Tavarez’s thesis projects were a hand-typeset, hand-bound original fairy tale and five short stories about several generations of a Dominican American family. In creating these, she was partly inspired by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich’s evocation of a family history through short stories in Love Medicine. Graduating with a bachelor of fine arts degree, Gomera-Tavarez worked designing health books and posters for Latin American audiences for the World Health Organization in Washington, D.C. After founding an online magazine, Plantin, foregrounding black immigrant writers, she joined Philadelphia’s Authentic Campaigns to design progressive and activist campaigns and publicity.
Tavarez expanded the five-story compendium from her thesis to produce her first book for young adults, High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora. Her entry into the publishing world led to her being invited to join Las Musas, a Latina writing collective, and she was delighted when her book was selected by the Bronx’s Word Up Community Bookshop—located in a largely Dominican enclave home to many of her family members—for its teen book club. She also celebrated the book’s translation to Spanish as Buenos espíritus, enabling all her relations to read it.
The eleven stories in High Spirits center on the Beléns, a family rooted in the fictional Dominican town of Hidalpa and the grandfather’s colmado, or rural general store. Young Gabriel’s recollection in the first story of an accident at his Dominican grandmother’s house sets the island-hopping scene, with the collection touching down in New Jersey, New York City, and Puerto Rico in addition to the environs of Hidalpa. Cousins vacillate between partying and favoring church; younger brothers get dragged along on dates; and islanders ponder the problematic masculinity of patriarchal husbands. Franklyn’s dabbling in marijuana in New York leads to an island stay at Tia Lupe’s that puts him in a position to redeem himself—and provide an antidote to machismo. Dominican Spanish is sprinkled throughout the collection, and a handwritten family tree is helpfully included. Gomera-Tavarez mentioned to Charlton-Trujillo that the book’s magical elements are largely drawn from Afro-Caribbean traditions and spirituality stemming from the Yoruba culture of West Africa.
In School Library Journal Sara Lissa Paulson advised readers to “expect both realism … and full-force magic realism with the past everpresent.” A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that Gomera-Tavarez evinces “a focused emotional intelligence” across the collection’s wide spectrum of narrative perspectives—male and female, straight and queer, young and old. Observing that themes of “belonging, social class, patriarchy, and language thread evenly throughout,” the reviewer deemed High Spirits a “labor of love imbued with dedication to family.” In Booklist, Jessica Agudelo praised the stories as “richly evocative” and “deeply personal and relatable … seeped in nostalgia and harsh but fierce love.” Admiring the “vivid and poetic imagery” and “thematic material ripe for contemplation,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer hailed High Spirits as a “soulfully crafted debut”—“a sensitive, intrinsically feminist work.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2022, Jessica Agudelo, review of High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora, p. 51.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2022, review of High Spirits.
School Library Journal, April, 2022, Sara Lissa Paulson, review of High Spirits, p. 146.
ONLINE
Camille Gomera-Tavarez website, https://cgtdesign.net/ (June 1, 2023).
Las Musas website, https://www.lasmusasbooks.com/ (April 21, 2022), e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, “Happy Book Birthday to Camille Gomera-Tavarez’s Debut Collection of Short Stories, High Spirits!”
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 17, 2022), review of High Spirits; (June 24, 2022), Shannon Maughan, “Spring 2022 Flying Starts: Camille Gomera-Tavarez.”
Hello! My name is Camille Gomera-Tavarez.
I’m an authoress, designer, and creative from New Jersey with a BFA in Graphic Design & Creative Writing from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ask me about sustainable, accessible design, bright colors, fun branding, and the ever-fulfilling craft of honest storytelling.
Spring 2022 Flying Starts: Camille Gomera-Tavarez
By Shannon Maughan | Jun 24, 2022
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Camille Gomera-Tavarez
The inspirations for Camille Gomera-Tavarez’s widely praised debut collection High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora (Levine Querido)—her far-flung family and its lore, her interest in the art of bookmaking, her admiration for favorite authors’ work—were always on the edge of her mind; she just didn’t know it until she got to college.
When Gomera-Tavarez left her northern N.J. hometown and began her studies in creative writing and graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she was following her passions, unsure where a degree in those disciplines might lead. The picture became clearer as she spent more time in the classroom. “I took a Latin American literature class that focused on the ways that the literature related to artworks of the magical realism period,” she says. “And that was amazing. From the first day, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ”
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For her senior thesis, Gomera-Tavarez blended her blossoming writing and design skills into several media projects, including a hand-bound, hand-typeset chapbook of an original fairy tale, and a 76-page volume containing five interconnected short stories about multiple generations of an extended Dominican American family, entitled High Spirits. She offered a small run of the volume for sale but did not consider any other avenues for it.
Just after graduating in 2019 with her BFA, Gomera-Tavarez landed a job at the World Health Organization in Washington, D.C., where she worked on Latin American health initiatives designing various health-related books and posters, including a campaign for Vaccination Week, “which for 2020 turned out to be a little bigger,” she says, in light of the pandemic. By that summer, Gomera-Tavarez had left the WHO and became a freelancer. “I started my own online magazine, which I also designed,” she says. “It’s called Plantin, and it features Black immigrant writers. I just did that with my friends.”
Things took a professional uptick that August when Gomera-Tavarez accepted a position at Authentic Campaigns in Philadelphia, where she now lives. “I design digital ads and marketing campaigns for progressive political candidates and some organizations,” she says. In the same month, she was contacted by Nick Thomas at Levine Querido. “He saw my portfolio online, and they were looking for graphic designers,” she recalls. “It was just a random cold email, but I responded, and he was also interested in my thesis project, which is on my website.” She sent him some stories, and, she notes, “he was like, ‘this is really good,’ and I was like, ‘I know,’ but I didn’t expect anything to come from it.”
To her surprise, Thomas asked if she might want to expand the collection to be published as a YA book. He invited her to be part of designing the volume, as well. “He cradled me through the whole process and sent over a contract,” she says. “I didn’t really have any intentions of being in this realm, but I’m glad that I’m here. I was always looking for something where I could put design and writing together in some way. I didn’t really know what that would look like, but this is definitely something that I feel like I was meant to do.”
Gomera-Tavarez has especially enjoyed the sense of community that has come with entering the publishing world. “Early on I was recruited to be part of the writing collective Las Musas, which is all Latina,” she says. “I run the Instagram. Also, just having the chance, even through Zoom or Twitter, to connect with a community of writers about questions I have has been nice—and for writers I’ve admired, like, knowing who I am, is crazy.”
One of her favorite things about being a newly published author has been sharing the book with her family, whose experiences and memories color each of her tales and to whom High Spirits is dedicated. During a flurry of publication events, she says, “My family coming down, and all of them getting the chance to hold it in their hands, was special. I feel like it’ll be even more impactful when it comes out
in Spanish in the fall, because most of them can’t read it [in English].”
Another high point was Word Up Community Bookshop in the Bronx selecting High Spirits for its teen book club. “They’re giving away free copies of it to local kids and I’m visiting soon,” Gomera-Tavarez says. “They’re in one of the biggest Dominican communities where a lot of my family lives. That was the exact target audience I was looking for, so to find out how quickly they had latched onto it and had been delivering it to the people I wanted to read it was really special.”
These days Gomera-Tavarez is trying to balance her day job with her writing. She is finishing a second book under contract at LQ, due out in fall 2023. “It’s going to be more of a traditional YA novel set in a high school,” she says. “There are a bunch of magical objects and teens navigating them. But while High Spirits focuses on toxic masculinity and gender in that way, this one is more about femininity and sisterhood.”
A version of this article appeared in the 06/27/2022 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Camille Gomera-Tavarez
Happy book birthday to Camille Gomera-Tavarez's debut collection of short stories, High Spirits!
4/21/2022 0 Comments
We're wishing a huge happy book birthday to Camille Gomera-Tavarez and her debut collection of short stories, High Spirits.
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Today, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo interviews Camille about her debut which Kirkus Reviews calls, “a labor of love with a dedication of family.”
A Publishers Weekly starred review says High Spirits is, “full of vivid and poetic imagery, settings worthy of drinking in, and thematic material ripe for contemplation about identity, intergenerational memory, and patriarchy and toxic masculinity . . . ”
High Spirits is a collection of eleven interconnected short stories from the Dominican diaspora. It is centered on one extended family – the Beléns – across multiple generations.
e.E. Charlton-Trujillo: Camille, I am so excited to be in conversation with you. You've written a collection of rich and vivid short stories that span from the U.S. to the Dominican Republic's fictional town of Hidalpa -- Santo Domingo, Paterson and San Juan. How are you feeling about High Spirits finally coming into the world?
Camille Gomera-Tavarez.: First, thank you so much for taking the time to read it, E.! I admire you so much, so thank you!
And, well, I am feeling very anxious about the book launching as it is pretty much the first thing I’ve ever published at all. When I was starting senior year of college and writing the first threads of High Spirits, I couldn’t have imagined I would ever call myself a published author. When I started, I was still working through mixed emotions about my grandmother passing, and by the time I got the book deal my grandfather had recently passed. So, I feel really lucky to have been given the chance to properly finish this project and give it the love it deserved, especially in their honor. I hope that the people that I want to read it – young Afro-Latinx people and Dominican-Americans – will find their way to my stories.
e.E.: Between what is real and what is magical, you explore the intersections of intergenerational loss, love, identity, class, masculinity, femininity, family and more. Can you talk about the choice to intertwine these topics and characters in the eleven short stories?
CGT: As I worked through the stories, my methodology was to take a memory from my own life or a story from my family’s life, write it out plainly, and find a central theme that I could then tie back to masculinity and identity in some way. And then I would just layer it beneath this established family and characters I’d created.
At first, I was just writing a couple stories in the same universe, and then after reading Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and seeing a family history told in short stories, I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read. And at the time I was taking a class on Latin American literature and learning the history of magical realism in the Americas, which also greatly influenced me as I was writing.
e.E.: Why was it important for you to move between what is real and what is magical in this collection?
CGT: I love books with just a touch of magic. I think the first book I read like that was Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and I was just mind blown in high school. I feel like there’s this resurgence of similar touches of magic with TV shows like Atlanta, Rami, and Reservation Dogs. I love getting a little lost and not knowing exactly what is going on and having to figure it out.
I really found a piece of myself when I learned about Lo Real Maravilloso and its place in the canon of literature. It felt really powerful to free myself from the rules of western structures of storytelling. I really hate rules and grammar and stuff. And, if you want to get philosophical, what even is reality? Isn’t everything made up? So why can’t a boy be possessed by a demon that pulls him through time? Why can’t that exist alongside reality? If you visit the Caribbean and other places, stories like that are commonplace and taken as truth. Those family stories are what inspired me to write the book.
e.E.: Barbaro's barbershop culture (and political banter) set a perfect backdrop for ten-year-old Yoanson's first (and unwanted) haircut. Barber Tony and Yoanson's older brother Jose see haircuts and manhood differently. Why is this important for young readers to see?
CGT: I wrote that story after a talk with my brother. Initially, I wanted to write something about my experience at Dominican hair salons, where I went at least once a week to get my hair blown out and straightened. And it was often a demeaning experience. But then, we were talking about a time when my father had punished my brother by making him shave his head to the scalp. Then, I was looking through YouTube and I found a similar recent video of a Dominican father taking his 10-year-old son with big curly hair to get a haircut and the boy was not happy about it. So, I was like “Ok, this is a thing.” I wondered why men do this and why this is an issue, especially for young Black boys trying to find joy in the world. I feel like hair is such a personal thing.
There is this hardness, especially with Black and Immigrant parents, that I feel doesn’t have to be there when preparing your child for the world. And a lot of times people are forced to be accomplices in these aggressions that are going on around them because they don’t know how to speak up or stop it from happening. So, I wanted to present someone like Tony as an example of how someone might be able to use the privileges they do have to step in when they see something wrong.
e.E.: Skipping Stones’ unrequited, same sex love story was palpable. My heart was breaking for Ana while also understanding Zahaira's reluctance. Why was this story important to include in the collection?
CGT: I felt like I needed to write a love story or just something that wasn’t as heavy as the other stories. So, I figured it may as well be a queer love story (straight ones are so boring). I feel like I had a similar relationship with the first girl I met when I came to America who was also my neighbor and my best friend. I wanted to show a story where there is an absence of men, with these two girls, but the impact of toxic masculinity still manages to creep in, as it often does in queer relationships. So, this is how it turned out. I’m glad you liked it! I feel like it was one of the more fun stories to write, even though, yeah lol, Ana was going through a tough time.
e.E.: Life After The Storm transitions the reader from what is real to what is magical, and submerges the reader as Jorge embodies the lives of women from his family over time. Would you share the choice of water, birth, storms and having a man experience womanhood?
CGT: For most of the magic throughout the book, I am pulling from Afro-Caribbean traditions and spirituality which is greatly influenced by West African Yoruba culture. So, water and rebirth play a large role in Yoruba religions. I, myself, am a Pisces and a water baby. My mother went into labor with me while she was in a tub. It can be a life-giving and rejuvenating thing but also be scary and cause destruction. Especially with hurricane season every year.
I pulled from several dreams I had, as well – I like to write my dreams down. I had a really impactful dream once where I was just going through my past lives, and I was my grandmother and then my father and then my mother until I got to where I was at that exact moment in bed. I woke up crying from that dream because it shook me so much, but I was also just grateful to be the product of so many choices that came before me. It shifted my perspective.
Jorge is in this moment of trying to figure out his identity in a country that seems like it doesn’t want him there. I was thinking about how genealogy is often traced from the mother through matrilineal ancestry and how past trauma is passed through DNA. So, it seemed natural that he would become all the women who had made choices that led to his being in the United States. I also wanted to find a way to mess around with gendered pronouns a bit, especially going back to the theme of toxic masculinity and patriarchy and challenging notions of gender binaries.
e.E.: I want to thank you so much for sharing all of this. I cannot wait for this collection to reach young readers. In the meantime, are you working on something new?
CGT: I don’t know how much I can say, but yes I’m currently working on my next novel which will hopefully come out Fall 2023 and it’s definitely going to be much lighter and less serious. Whereas High Spirits takes on masculinity, I feel this next one is focused more on femininity and sisterhood. And of course, magic.
e.E.: I can’t wait for your new work! Can you share where people can find you online?
CGT: You can find me on Instagram and Twitter @cgomeratavarez and on my website at www.cgtdesign.net
Buy High Spirits today!
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Camille Gomera-Tavarez is an Afro-Dominican writer, designer, and creative from New Jersey. She has a BFA in Graphic Design & Creative Writing from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently based in Philadelphia, PA. High Spirits is her debut.
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Mexican American author, filmmaker and youth literacy activist e.E. Charlton-Trujillo has written several award-winning books for teens and children, most notably the Fat Angie series, an ALA Stonewall Award Winner, and Prizefighter en Mi Casa, a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Winner. Their first picture book, Lupe Lopez: Rock Star Rules, co-authored with NYT Bestseller Pat Zietlow Miller, illustrated by award-winning illustrator Joe Cepeda, releases June 2022. e.E. is the co-founder of the nonprofit Never Counted Out and co-host of the Instagram Live series Off The Cuff.
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High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora.
By Camille Gomera-Tavarez.
Apr. 2022. 224p. Levine Querido, $18.99 (9781646141296).
Gr. 10-12.
Debut author Gomera-Tavarez presents a richly evocative collection of interconnected These 11 short stories span from the Dominican Republic to the U.S., Puerto Rico, and back, capturing the lives of multiple generations of the Belen family. Central to the family lore is the fictitious town of Hidalpa, home of abuelos colmado, a general store typical of small towns, and the nexus for the family. Gomera-Tavarez focuses each chapter on a different member of the sprawling Belens, giving each character room to breathe as they yearn for independence while continually feeling the mg of obligations from their complicated family relationships and heritage. Ordinary scenarios, from youthful misadventures, a visit to the barbershop, and participating in a domino tournament, are punctuated by themes of mental health, internalized colonialism, and machismo, realistically mirroring their influence on daily life in scenes that will easily resonate with readers everywhere. The handwritten family tree is helpful for keeping the connections straight and, along with the familiar Dominican argot--"Dique," "ya tu sabe"--characterize this slim volume as deeply personal and relatable. Seeped in nostalgia and harsh but fierce love, this is a memorable family saga in its own right.--Jessica Agudelo
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Agudelo, Jessica. "High Spirits: Short Stories on Dominican Diaspora." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2022, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695925838/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5237d24c. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.
Gomera-Tavarez, Camille HIGH SPIRITS Levine Querido (Teen None) $18.99 4, 5 ISBN: 978-1-64614-129-6
Interrelated stories about the extended Bel�n family sprout from the Dominican Republic and branch out into the diaspora.
In 11 short stories, Afro-Dominican debut author Gomera-Tavarez offers slice-of-life peeks into the Bel�ns of Hidalpa, Dominican Republic. While these stories are fictional, the author brings Hidalpa vividly to life, with a focus on the intergenerational experiences of a single family member in each story. Whether focusing on 10-year-old Cristabel, teenage Jos�lito, adult Gabriel, or any one of the many other family members, each displays a focused emotional intelligence. These eye-opening diasporic stories cross borders, taking place in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, and New York. The setting of each is strong: Unfolding in locations including Abuelo's colmado or general store, the barber shop, beach, and a Paterson, New Jersey, high school during a lockdown drill, the everyday lives of the Bel�n family past and present read as authentic and immersive. Themes of belonging, social class, patriarchy, and language thread evenly throughout, with Dominican Spanish as well as African American Vernacular English infused with ease. The simple touch of a handwritten family tree at the beginning of the book conveys a diarylike quality to this collection; the inclusion of a faded picture of the author's grandparents adds further intimacy.
A labor of love imbued with dedication to family. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-adult)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Gomera-Tavarez, Camille: HIGH SPIRITS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690892146/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f1b3f61d. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.
GOMERA-TAVAREZ, Camille. High Spirits. 224p. Levine Querido. Apr. 2022. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9781646141296.
Gr 10 Up--In this debut collection of 11 interrelated yet stand-alone stories, the Afro-Latino Dominican American experience is center stage, a breath of fresh, saltwater air to all readers and a mirror to island-hopping teenagers in the United States with strong ties to their extended families in the Dominican Republic. The collection starts with a visual family tree spanning four generations. Some stories are set in northeastern U.S., but most are set in Hidalpa, a small, fictional coastal town near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The first story features Gabriel, who suffers from a fit of memory rather than forgetfulness, remembering spilling the habichuelas at his grandmother Mabel Belen's house while in therapy in the U.S. Contradictions prevail with cousins partying hard and remembering church, arguments about islander racism and sexism, the cruelty of older generation husbands, and younger brothers in tow on dates. When his mother finds marijuana in his room, Franklyn is sent from NYC to the island to Tia Lupe's, where he is made a servant but helps his cousin avoid date rape. Memory pervades the collection with all the vicissitudes of global identity-making, including interminable waits on visas. Expect both realism with full phrases of authentic Dominican Spanish, and full-force magic realism with the past everpresent The last story ties the collection together with La Dona Belen's recounting of family history, with just a hint of sweet fiction. VERDICT A must-buy for libraries serving older teens.--Sara Lissa Paulson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Paulson, Sara Lissa. "GOMERA-TAVAREZ, Camille. High Spirits." School Library Journal, vol. 68, no. 4, Apr. 2022, pp. 146+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A699585771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b7f6a08. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.