Canteen: The State of Creation

(From our Hot Authors project, forthcoming in Issue Seven.)

Jennine Capó Crucet, photographed by Tierney Gearon

Canteen Asks: What’s the Hottest Thing You’ve Ever Read?

THE TEXT: a tattoo pressed against this one boy’s heart. Puro Amor is what it said, the words in a tangled script, the tips of each letter licking his skin.

I took in those two words just a handful of times. But still, for a long while after, I traced Puro Amor over my own breastbone—with my own inked fingers, with the steadier fingers of others—trying and trying to finish the story those two words only started.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald and won the John Gardner Book Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, Epoch, and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011. She is from Miami but lives in L.A. for now.