Gabby Rivera is an author who has hustled her way through life to the point that she now lives in Sacramento with a baby on the way. Creating, empowering identity and spreading joy were the three core mantras of her zoom presentation at Michigan State.
Invited by Her Campus and MSU’s Women*s Council to attend at least one Women’s History Month (WHM) event, I arrived way too early on March 15th. Over an hour before the opening (due to daylight saving time), I ended up eating at the International Center before heading back to Erickson Kiva for the hybrid event. I was hoping for it to be a zoomed broadcast of an in-person event. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
I could not meet Ms. Rivera BUT I was able to receive 1 of 50 copies of Juliet Takes A Breath. I was also able to put myself in the running for another Gabby Rivera book, America: Fast & Fuertona, by filling out an entrance ticket which would be randomly picked, I won! So, I am happy to say that I now have 2 books by Gabby Rivera, her debut and her take on the first female, latinx [a.k.a queer/latin American] superhero from Marvel Comics.
I think the best part of the presentation was when Gabby let us know that she wasn’t always a big star who could live off whatever they wrote. That, like many, she had to hustle to scrape on by. You have to remember that her debut Juliet Takes A Breath didn’t start out as a Penguin imprint book, it was an IPPY award-winning novel before getting republished by Penguin. Simply put, Gabby was one of many young writers who got a manuscript she put her heart into, accepted by a small independent publisher, that’s where the I and P come from in IPPY. She did not expect this book to go nationwide, and while she is happy it did get such huzzah, Gabby wrote this book to inspire and to acknowledge herself and people like her.
Juliet is a lesbian, Puerto Rican American from the Bronx; Gabby is a queer, Puerto Rican American from the Bronx; America is the first queer, female, hispanic-based superhero in the Marvel Universes; do you notice a theme here? Is she perhaps getting pigeon-holed as just one thing? Yes, but it still rings true to who she is and if she can change the narrative little by little then perhaps readers of all kinds can have more of an understanding of who she is and who she was originally trying to reach and inspire.