[Many thanks to writer Dahlma Llanos Figueroa for bringing this item to our attention.] The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (NMPRAC) in Chicago, Illinois, presents a book talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Quiara Alegría Hudes on November 20, 2025, at 6:00pm. Her new novel, The White Hot (Penguin Random House, 2025) will be available for purchase at the museum. [Museum Member Benefit: 20% off.]
The book, “the story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment,” will be “on the shelves” on November 11, 2025. Hudes has always honored her Caribbean-centered upbringing, as both her mother and stepfather are Puerto Rican.
Book Description (Penguin Random House): April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.
The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricismand tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Water by the Spoonful and the musical In the Heights, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and which she adapted for the screen. Her memoir, My Broken Language, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cut, The Nation, and American Theater Magazine. She is co-founder with her cousin Sean of the prison writing program Emancipated Stories.
For more information, see https://nmprac.org/
To RSVP, go to https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSfdsfI4MVKOYB…/viewform
For book information, see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/749057/the-white-hot-by-quiara-alegria-hudes/, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593732332?tag=randohouseinc7986-20, and https://bookstore.centerforfiction.org/item/ZoOPMvNQhqYetpfFn1LEzg?utmca
Also read a review at rhttps://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/quiara-alegria-hudes-gives-the-american-landscape-a-puerto-rican-voice
[Many thanks to writer Dahlma Llanos Figueroa for bringing this item to our attention.] The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (NMPRAC) in Chicago, Illinois, presents a book talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Quiara Alegría Hudes on November 20, 2025, at 6:00pm. Her new novel, The White Hot (Penguin Random House, 2025) will