Quiara Alegría Hudes

[upbeat music] Quiara Alegria Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, composer, and novelist whose work has reshaped contemporary American theater.

She's the co-creator of In the Heights, the groundbreaking musical that helped redefine whose stories belong at the center of the American stage.

Her play, Water by the Spoonful, earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and her writing across theater, music, memoir, and now fiction has consistently explored identity, family, belonging, and the complicated inheritance of culture and care.

We first spoke on Design Matters when Quiara released her memoir, My Broken Language, a book that traced her coming of age at the intersection of language, lineage, and spiritual worlds.

Our interview took a deep dive into Quiara's life and career.

In our interview today, we will be talking about her extraordinary new novel, The White Hot, a riveting story about rage and restraint, motherhood and freedom, desire and time, and how becoming oneself can come at devastating cost.

Quiara, welcome back to Design Matters.

Thank you so much.

I'm excited to talk a second time with you.

Me too.

Quiara, you've described writing and reading in recent years as something that saved your life.

How so?

Uh, yes.

I had a hard time in the last handful of years.

Uh, became-- had to stop writing for a little while and became a full-time caretaker for a loved one who was not well.

And so that was profoundly stressful, um, just took a lot of time.

Uh, was also kind of depressing, and I lost my spark a little bit.

During this period, reading is what tethered me to the fact that I still had an inner life.

I felt so deadened.

I felt like a zombie because my entire being was revolving around caring for someone else.

And yet, when I read, and I'll never forget the books I read during this period, I still existed.

I was still in there somewhere.

And so I understood in a new and, and very literal way how people have said, you know, "Books saved me." Uh, that happened to me.

What books were you reading?

So this is a very beloved, uh, bibliography.