In the Latino community, the Trump campaign, even when it seemed it was a long shot he would be elected president, his campaign itself just caused lots of consternation and nervousness and anger. Famously, piñata makers started making piñatas of Donald Trump, even before he won the Republican nomination. There was this sense that, here's a person who's rising in the polls because he's insulting us, because he's created this scapegoated image of us as the people responsible for the decline of the United States.

I'm, by nature, a really optimistic person. It goes back to my parents having been each divorced three times and my finding some way to survive all that. I always managed to survive by being upbeat.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

I am someone who is fascinated with European German history, the Holocaust, and to see these parallels in our own democratic system, and then to see them come to this absolutely incredible climax, and this fruition with the election of The Donald, it was just too much.

I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.

I just feel that art is more important than ever, that art is something that can unify us, that can make America stronger.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.