I'm Lilium Rivera is an award-winning writer of young adult books.

Her first novel, The Education of Margo Sanchez, established Lilium as a fresh go-to voice for YA fiction.

Her latest, dealing in dreams, is a dystopian novel that follows an all-girl crew as they fight for survival.

Like her characters, Lilliam has faced hard choices about who she is, what she wants, and what she's willing to sacrifice to get it.

Lilliam, welcome back to New York City.

Thanks.

Thanks.

I'm really happy to be back home.

So my fellow nerd, what did you read growing up?

Oh, man.

I read all the coming-of-age Judy Blume books.

But then I also read Clockwork Orange and The Outsiders by

S. E. Hinton, Frankenstein. I kind of liked all those things. So I was like, I would read

everything and anything. Did you have a favorite Latina character or author? Gosh, I didn't get

into anyone who was a Latina author until I was in college, and that would be Sandra

Cisneros. And then Juno Diaz's collection of short stories called Drown, that kind of like woke

me up and made me think, okay, the possibility of me being able to write to be a fiction

author, even though it took years after that. How did it occur to you between your childhood

and college that you were reading

books where the characters didn't represent you in full? It felt to me like I was reading

science fiction in a lot of ways because it was so outside of my own childhood, you know, growing up

in the Bronx. So I was like, wow, this is how, what's it like in Wyoming? Like, you know, so. And I was accepting of it. Like, I was just like, okay, cool, this is a different life. You know, I was really aware of the fact that there weren't any Puerto Ricans or any Latinos in any of these books, but I was still accepting of it until I got to college. And then I was like, oh, wait,

...