Writer Quiara Alegría Hudes On ‘White Hot’ Rage

Fresh Air

NPR

Books, Society & Culture, Arts, Tv & Film

4.3 • 36.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has written a debut novel that asks a provocative question: What if a woman claimed the right to a spiritual quest like men have done for centuries in literature? 'The White Hot' follows a young mother from Philadelphia who walks away from everything to find herself. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about her antihero April, her collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda on 'In The Heights,' and her mother’s spiritual gifts.

Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews the mystery novel ‘Even the Dead,’ by John Banville.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Over the years at NPR's Fresh Air, we've gotten to talk with a lot of great filmmakers.
0:05.4	Now we've made a playlist of some of our favorites, including Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg,
0:10.6	Ava DuVernay, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and others.
0:15.2	Find all our new playlists and more at Fresh Air Plus at plus.npr.org slash fresh air.
0:22.6	This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
0:28.2	Kiara Aligria Hewdi's, writer of In The Heights, Water by the Spoonful, and the Memoir
0:34.9	My Broken Language. She recently published her first novel, The White Hot,
0:40.2	and it opens in a locked bathroom. The bathroom is the only place April Soto can escape
0:46.2	her small chaotic life. She's 26 years old and lives in a Philadelphia row house with her
0:52.3	mother, grandmother, and her 10-year-old daughter,
0:55.1	Noelle. She's the book's anti-hero, volatile, quick to anger, driven by a heat she calls
1:02.2	the white hot. The bathroom is where she goes to cool down or disappear, until one day,
1:08.4	April visits her daughter, Noelle's school, and sees an art project, a drawing of their home. And there April is locked in the bathroom. The hiding place she believed was private had actually never been a secret at all. Her daughter had been watching the whole time. This realization hits hard, sparking an urgent need to run, and so April buys a one-way
1:31.3	bus ticket to the farthest place she can find. The White Hat unfolds as a letter, a mother
1:37.0	writing to the daughter she left behind, trying to explain the choice that changed both of their
1:42.0	lives. Hughie's won the Pulitzer Prize for Water
1:45.4	by the Spoonful, which explored addiction and trauma in a Puerto Rican American family.
1:50.9	She also wrote the book, In The Heights, and adapted it for the screen. And her memoir, My Broken
1:56.1	Language, traced her multi-generational upbringing in Philadelphia, a world she explores in the white
2:02.4	hot. Kiyara, welcome to fresh air. Thanks. I'm excited to talk. There are very few acts we judge
2:11.4	more harshly than a mother who leaves her child, who abandons her child. And as I'm reading the book, I was wondering how
2:20.8	you let go of that judgment to bring life into April if you ever even held that judgment to
	...

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