Marina T. Budhos
Photo by Frank Lazare
Bio
Marina Budhos is an author of fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults. Her newest novel, The Long Ride, was published in September 2019. Her novel Watched received a Walter Honor and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature YA Honor. Other books include Tell Us We’re Home, Ask Me No Questions, The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. With her husband and co-author Marc Aronson, Budhos has published Eyes of the World: Robert Capa & Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism and Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, a Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist. Budhos has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, received a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and twice received a New Jersey Arts fellowship. She is currently a professor of English at William Paterson University.
I was working with my film collaborator on a Friday—the only day I can spare—when an email popped up that National Endowment for the Arts was trying to get a hold of me. My heart pounded but I couldn’t believe it was so. I was so nervous, I wound up calling back a spam number before I reached the NEA administrator.
For the past few years I’ve been working relentlessly on my YA career while teaching, serving on committees, advising MFA students, and raising my family. Even my sabbatical year was consumed by family illness, death, and mourning, and thus my writing was very fragile. But a few summers ago, sitting on a porch in Martha’s Vineyard, I heard a voice—an elderly man, an immigrant, formal, pained. The next summer the beginning of this novel poured out of me—it was the first new adult material I had done in a while and I could not stop. So much had been backed up in me like a complicated dam. Once again I was back into the maw of deadlines, teaching, managing, school visits for my YA work.
To receive affirmation for work that has been kept a bit of a secret, to the side, makes me want to weep with gratitude. I cannot wait to clear everything away to take this rare time off and dive again into this world. I feel as if the story, the voice, is waiting for me like a luscious layer cake.