About the Interviewee: “Hailey Alcaraz writes multicultural coming-of-age books about girls using their heartbreak to change the world. She began her writing career in the sixth grade as a Kid Reporter for Time For Kids and remains passionate about crafting stories about identity, love, and resilience. She is the author of two YA novels, Up in Flames and Rosa By Any Other Name, a Pura Belpre Award Honoree, as well as the forthcoming middle grade novel, Five Days at the Hotel Adams. Hailey lives in Scottsdale with her husband, two daughters, and precocious German shepherd, Lemon” (Bio from the author’s website).
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Hailey Alcaraz: [I have] a deep appreciation for YA literature. I enjoy YA books, and I really believe in the power a good book can have in a young person’s life, especially those windows-and-doors kind of books that reflect their lived experiences while also teaching them about things.
HA: I’ve always wanted to write coming-of-age [books]. The multicultural piece wasn’t intentional, but it’s something I keep coming back to largely because of my own identity. I’m still learning about my biracial identity, and wanting to write the kinds of books I wanted to read as a young person.
HA: Honestly, no—publishing a book doesn’t feel 100% certain until you’re holding the physical book in your hands. I started Up in Flames during COVID when I was at home with my oldest daughter, and I just needed a creative outlet. Gone with the Wind is a really significant story for me—my grandma gave me my first copy, my husband proposed in a copy; I’ve spent years thinking about what I love about this book, and what I wish it did differently, so when I finally figured out how I’d handle a modern version of it, it just came pouring out.
HA: [I was] inspired by teaching Romeo and Juliet and really having a hard time making sense of the ending—that these two feuding families would truly be peaceful after all that trauma. I [also] read Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights and loved the way it approached 1920s Shanghai and knew I wanted a unique historical setting. I hadn’t read much about 1950s Arizona—how school segregation and the civil rights movement impacted Mexican Americans. Research was challenging—sources and pictures from South Phoenix are limited so it was a lot of work figuring out what Rosa’s life would’ve been like.
HA: I’m really lucky that my editor told me early on that there aren’t many topics I had to shy away from with middle-grade readers; I just had to be conscious of how to approach it. My books deal with complicated subjects, encouraging readers to think outside of black and white, and the same is true for Hotel Adams. I read a lot of middle grade to get a sense of voice and pacing, and I even chatted with Kyla Zhao, who blurbed my first book, about how she switched from her first two books (which were new-adult crossover) to her middle-grade debut.
HA: I told my agent I wanted to write something [like] the Dear America books, which were my introduction to historical fiction as a young reader. We were approached with this series, and I wrote a few pitches—Hotel Adams being one of them. It was my first time selling a book before I’d written it.
HA: Hotel Adams is also a standalone—the Gutsy Girls aren’t necessarily linked by plot. The other book in the series so far is set in New York in the 1860s and my book is in Phoenix in 1910, [but] there are certain themes that resonate between both of them—love of reading and poetry and the evolution of the suffrage movement, but that was purely coincidental. I didn’t read The Four Seasons of Florence Wallace until a month ago.
HA: It’s been great! It’s a wonderful team and the concept for the books is so lovely and so needed. I’d love to write more.
Hayley Bigelow, Pine Reads Review Writer