Quiara Alegria Hudes and Dascha Polanco to Appear in Conversation at The Strand Next Week

Join Quiara Alegria Hudes as she presents her newest book My Broken Language. Joining Quiara in conversation is SAG award winning actress Dascha Polanco. This event will be held on Crowdcast.io and will be live streamed to The Strand's Facebook Page.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.

"Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories." said Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton

Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.

Weaving together Hudes's love of books with the stories of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is an inspired exploration of home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.

Quiara Alegría Hudes is a playwright, wife and mother of two, barrio feminist and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work's exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. Hudes is a playwright in residence at Signature Theater in New York, and Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon, has dedicated its 2017 season to producing her work. She recently founded a crowd-sourced testimonial project, Emancipated Stories, that seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world.

Dascha Polanco was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn by way of Miami, She is a SAG Award winning actress well known for her groundbreaking roles in Hollywood as a leading young Latina actor. A fan favorite, Polanco plays the role of "Dayanara Diaz" on the hit Netflix original series, "Orange is the New Black" (OITNB). In addition, she recently starred in Ava DuVernay's Netflix series "When They See Us" alongside John Leguizamo. Polanco will next be seen in HBO Max's adaption of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In The Heights" which will be released in 2021 and the MGM film, Samaritan opposite Sylvester Stallone.

Quiara Alegria Hudes Dascha Polanco: My Broken Language: A Memoir takes place Tuesday April 06 07:00PM-8:00PM ET. This event is free. You can register for the event here. To support the authors and the Strand, you can purchase a copy of the book here.