Word Up welcomes journalist and author Amaris Castillo for the NYC celebration of her new novel, Bodega Stories, a window into a Dominican family’s bodega and the community at its heart. In conversation with Castillo will be photojournalist Erika Morillo, author of Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir

“Bodega Stories gives voice to the working-class immigrants from the Caribbean who often play such important roles in community building, those who create safe spaces for gathering like bodegas, barbershops, salones de belleza, and mom-and-pop restaurants. Castillo’s descriptions are rich and layered, giving a sense of place and situating the reader beautifully inside each nook and cranny of Orlando Latin Market.”—Erika Morillo

ABOUT THE BOOK
A bodega is much more than a neighborhood grocery store–it’s a lifeline to community and culture. In Bodega Stories, Amaris Castillo takes readers inside Orlando Latin Market, a bodega owned and operated by her parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, to reveal a thriving local hub that bridges generations, languages, and traditions.

Meet the regulars: Castillo’s glamorous T a Margarita, who has worked part-time at the bodega for years; longtime cook Alberto, who arrives early to prepare the store’s rice, beans, empanadas, and croquetas; Chico, the owner of the barbershop next door; and Esther, who visits after church every Sunday for her crispy chicharrones. Through captivating and charming true stories of visitors who come looking for products from Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, and many other countries, readers get a glimpse into the lives of employees and customers as they navigate matters of immigration, love, history, food, and identity.

Interwoven are snapshots of daily life, like a bulletin board outside the store where local residents post apartments for rent, messages through the bodega’s Facebook page asking for hard-to-find items, and photos from the past and present. Including Castillo’s own family’s story from the Dominican Republic to New York to Florida, Bodega Stories is a portrait of finding home–between the cultures we inherit and the ones we embrace.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Amaris Castillo is a Brooklyn native and daughter of Dominican immigrants. A former newspaper reporter, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lowell Sun, Bradenton Herald, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and lives in Tampa Bay with her family. Bodega Stories is her debut.

Erika Morillo is a photographer and writer born and raised in the Dominican Republic. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Word Up welcomes author Andrew Felsher for the launch of Child Boss, with a conversation moderated by labor organizer, educator, and artist Nicole Maloof. The event will begin with a reading from Child Boss followed by a discussion about labor, the development of class consciousness, and normative forces that seep into and structure daily life.

The event will include a Q&A, inviting guests to participate in an open dialogue about labor, organizing, interventions, and what happens when workers confront those in power. Guests can expect an accessible and fun environment that will also engage in serious subjects around labor, class, and possible interventions.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Playful and unflinching, Child Boss throws its narrator into the humiliations and pains of being a worker. Moving between desire, free markets, debt, basketball courts, private golf courses, family arguments, school, high-revving engines, and subversive humor, the novel probes how a young boy metabolizes and resists a world marred by precarity, labor, competition, value, and exchange.

Child Boss obliterates and reconfigures the boundaries between boyhood and manhood, boss and worker, kindness and exploitation, public and private life, tenderness and brutality. It creates openings to interrogate how social, cultural, and economic rituals of domination seep into and structure daily life. It asks: How might we intervene and develop alternatives to the overbearing weight of capitalism and what it does to people? How can we nourish rituals that reward connection and humanity, not extraction and dehumanization?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Felsher’s fiction and essays have appeared in EPOCH, São Paulo Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Fiction Writers Review, among other publications. In 2022, he co-founded 128 LIT, winner of CLMP’s 2023 Firecracker Award for Best Debut/Magazine. He is the author of the prose chapbook Notes from a Prison Cell (Bottlecap Press, 2023), which has been translated into Portuguese, and the novel Child Boss (128 LIT, 2026). He lives in New York City.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER
Born in Korea and raised in Massachusetts, Nicole Maloof received a BFA in painting and a BA in chemistry from Boston University. After graduation, she conducted organic chemistry research at Harvard University, taught in Korea for two years on a Fulbright teaching grant, and then moved to New York, where she earned her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University. Maloof currently lives and works in New York and has taught at Williams College and Sarah Lawrence College. She has exhibited at the International Print Center New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Boston Center for the Arts, and Crush Curatorial, among others, and her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Artnet. She is currently focused on labor organizing in New York City.

Please register in advance.