Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

Ploughshares is pleased to present Mario Alberto Zambrano with the ninth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” which appeared in the Spring 2019 issue, guest-edited by Rigoberto González. The $2,500 prize, sponsored Alice Hoffman, acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.

“Some of You” spans the immigration journey—from the home left behind in Central America to the promise felt upon arriving in the United States. Told from the perspective of many mothers, “Some of You” aches for the children lost along the way, the children yet to arrive, and the children withheld from their parents—ransomed in the in-between—alongside the reality of arriving in a country offering scant work for little pay and men who take without asking. Starkly realistic, Zambrano refuses to generalize the families he writes about, framing every thought with “some of you” or “some of us.” There is no one migrant experience.

Of the story, Hoffman writes: “With ‘Some of You,’ Mario Alberto Zambrano has written a fierce and lyrical narrative that is both timely and timeless, a glorious story that brings us all together as readers and as human beings.”

Before returning to school to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for an MFA in English, where he received the John C. Schupes Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction, Zambrano danced for Batsheva Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Nederlands Dans Theater, and Ballet Frankfurt between the years 1994 and 2005. Loteria, his first novel (Harper Collins, 2013), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for the fall of 2013 and a finalist for the 2014 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. It was hailed as a Best Book of 2013 by Booklist, The Village Voice, Vogue, and School Library Journal. Zambrano has been awarded literary fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle. Currently, he’s working on a new novel while serving as Program Director for Orsolina28’s Kylián Summer Program and as Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School in New York City.

Below, Zambrano speaks about the inspiration and thinking behind his winning story.

What inspired “Some of You”?

Two summers ago, news outlets reported that undocumented families were being separated at the southern border of our country. The Trump administration had implemented a family separation policy directed toward illegal migrants who cross the border. During those horrid weeks of witnessing through various news outlets small children kept by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, videos, photographs, and audio recordings were shared demonstrating the emotional and psychological torment these children were (and are) going through. One particular audio recording of a young girl no older than five years old was posted by The New York Times. It revealed a plea from a child asking for her mother, spoken through sentences interrupted with cries for help that testified to the atrocity. In the moment when I downloaded the recording, and as I kept listening to it, my mind raced as to how I could help.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing the story?

As writers, we are confronted with the blank page, confronted with the opportunity of what will anchor the stories we write. Whether it be a personal affliction or obsession with the human condition, we are constantly trying to uncover a glimpse of truth in fiction. More importantly, we are privileged in that we can take the democratic act of writing it down. We can write and speak for those who do not have a chance to tell their own stories.

But that, too, has its complications because whose story is it to tell? Was this a story I could tell? If I did not have any direct affiliation to any of these characters suffering from the residual impact of this policy, then who am I to impart a point of view? These questions rattled in my mind, and yet, so did the young girl’s voice. My response, the only answer I could come up with through a fictional lens, was to write a letter, not from a writer sitting in his apartment in Boston but from a lineage of mothers who have tried, with all their might and courage and resources, to cross Central America in order to offer their children a better home only to find that a dream has turned into a nightmare.

How does this story fit with the rest of your work?

When I began writing “Some of You” it came through me like a stream, which doesn’t necessarily suggest anything other than the fact that it was borne from a well of urgency and motivation to express the humanity of what is being dismissed in the migrant experience. Both my parents were born in Mexico and I am a first generation Mexican American. My first novel, Lotería, is about a Mexican American family trying to cope with the struggles of living in south Texas, told from the point of view of the youngest daughter, Luz. And whereas Luz tells the story of her parents and sister through a limited perspective, as though peeking through a small hole through the walls of her house, “Some of You” has no walls. The scope of the narrative has no barriers. I wanted to find the other end, figuratively speaking, of the world and consciousness of a heritage, a culture, a folklore, and a biography of people I love and come from. I wanted to show these characters as human beings, not statistics.

What are you working on now?

“Some of You” is currently the opening chapter of a longer piece of writing tentatively titled Los Gallos.