among those books is a three volume encyclopedia and i guess you could count that as one but those were three was not really when it's not one it's really three books and so i you know sometimes counted in this as i don't know about fifteen and and whatever it's been your life's work it has been and and and i'm really surprised that my life took that turn because i never imagined that i would become a historian or let alone a writer i never really had that that great desire to wri expecting to fulfill plan a and pretty soon you're in plan b or plan c or plan d and you never knew that those were there and that those are options so i feel very fortunate and  and i'm really thankful that that things have turned out the way that they have well let me say that i i saw the interview that you gave for cutie and congressman herman by the  congratulate you because it's very impressive to hear you speak and to not break part of your life could never be told in one hour but we're following up because i know people want to know you more know the little girl from the bronx that made a good but before we go into that i am so impressed with your latest work and the title it's entices the season of rebels and roses i mean it's like an epic drama for motion pictures and that's how i think about it all so it's really interesting as i imagine the story  happening i think of it as if as a movie i watched you know when we were kids with that was our life going into movies everything that we learned was on the on the screen and you know we began to sink in those terms  writing a novel a historical novel is very very different from writing a history book and one of the things that i found out in going in this direction was that you're you're not accepted as a historian and you're not accepted as a novelist you're somewhat in between i've had friends who have asked me well what are you working on i said i'm working on a historical novel  oh and that that's it the conversation ends right there or or or novelist who have been at this craft craft for so long and i'm kind of coming into it this late in the game i kind of feel that i'm not i'm not quite there i'm not quite but anyway let me tell you something about the season of rebels and really deserve the respect because you work hard to get it and it's important that we review that part before we go on with the season of weapons of roses ok you know history as a teacher and i think that you really want to become a teacher at st i did i did i when i when i graduated from from high school first of all i wasn't even sure that i was going to go to college because we didn't have the mentors we didn't have role models in the community that we grew up in so i didn't know anybody who had ever gone to college or had become a college professor let alone a college professor and  we had moved to brooklyn and i has i was ready to graduate from high school and i found out that i i i loved school and i loved education and that whole experience was so enlightening to me that i didn't wanted to stop and so i went down to my guidance counsellor i think the week of graduation and i said i have to go to college i have to i have to continue and she looked at me with this weird look in her eye and like yeah ok so what are we going to do with you but i had i had a perfectly good academic record and  i suppose you could go to brooklyn college and i said there's a college in brooklyn and seriously i i found out about it and i went there i took the bus i went there i got to the campus and it was the most beautiful thing that i had ever seen because this at brooklyn college is really beautiful it reminded me of a of an m g m movie i could alice and then sing around in the singing on the college game emphasis and so i went to the registrar's office i registered and i started my college career now when i was ready to graduate well i was somewhere along the  school i was an english major then and i would have decided at that age already that so many yeah i was a see it a major i was an english major and i wanted to teach young adults and because i thought to myself if if i can help one kid in that classroom who is having the same kind of experiences that i was having at their age then i've done my job and so so i graduated with with a degree in education as well as my major we moved to chicago and i taught high school for four years oh my god and then what happened then came back to new york my husband was and medical school in chicago and so i was so i was working and we came back to new york we started a family and when i had i had this well what was happening at this time was the civil rights movement and the students who were walking out of classrooms and walking walking out of their their high schools and demanding that their experience and their history be taught in the schools yes and that whole fervor the entire the entire movement  grabbed me in such a way that i wanted to be a part of it and but i had two little girls and i couldn't very very well leave the children and go ahead and join any kind of a movement but i thought to myself well i can't i've got to prepare these years while i'm raising the children i will prepare and i went to stony brook and rolled in a history degree program got a master's in history and eventually a d in history and went back to teach at brooklyn college oh my god who helped me with the children also my father had had moved in with with me and my sister we shared him and he was the person that kept both of our households going he would spend a month with me and then take the train up to boston and spend a month with her and he would alternate and then she went to she went back to school and became a lawyer at stony brook and got my my month her children would complain bitterly that poppy was leaving and when it will turn to give him up i'd have to drive him to the train station and say oh papa you really want to go up there for a month and he says yeah because living in long i were i was beautiful story though i mean it's a beautiful story of developing a passion because that's what you have you have a passion for history right right i had a passion for reaching young people teenagers young people it was always and i think still have that i still have that connection so interesting because you mentioned you still have it because the season of rebel and roses i see it like a novel for young adults it is it is it's a book written already adults and and what it is is the ten year period where they plotted revolution for against spain and all of that happened in new york and all in the middle you something virginia i am so glad somebody is coming up with amazing when you when you look at the history and you see how the nash the people of these of these nations were really one people and they wanted that they wanted a  i was in the partment of puerto rican and latino studies and i chaired that department for fifteen years and by the i'm they found they find us they're all ready to graduate and they say wow this is my history and and you you develop for them a sense of identity that is positive and empowering and i said no no no i can't wait till i can't wait till they could say get to college because they may never they may never come into our classes card it's a labor issue also present yes yes because it was and that was an issue that we in the puerto rican community never really spoke about because we felt we were an integrated people and and that we really there was this belief that we didn't we didn't we were not racist we didn't have racism well of course we of course we did and in th story you know since who is a real person all of my characters are based on on historical figures you know since you marries a woman who is a mulatto and her family is very very distressed about it and and so she has to make a decision and she has to she has to deal with that and so she makes a decision very very early on because she falls in love with him you know like like an explosion she develops says this idea that well you know we have that my parents have the saddest her father was from spain and her mother was an order from puerto rico and and they had and she said we have the satisfied that if you have one drop of african blood that you're that that you're in syria she said i'll learn to deal with that i'll get over it and oh my god  a an intellectual he's a journalist and scraper and question for independents and before they get out state out of puerto rico they decide they're going to leave and he's going to burn his printing press and he's going me she knows her from puerto rico because if they're involved in the movement and not gets exiled very very early on she and her husband and family war and from new york she and her husband begin to to support revolution for cuba at that at that point in time and people have no idea that we have this vibrant community of i mean it's interesting to me because when i when i read from colonial to community i wanted people to know that the community that i came from and so many of us came from was an intact community that we weren't that we we didn't have we didn't bring hi issues that we didn't we didn't we were we were really we came from good families that worked hard and gave us the education that they could afford here with honorable and and i wrote sad because i wanted people to know what that community was like and then i realized women it i gotta go back i gotta go further back in time because because is like lack of congress let me tell you something virginia unfortunately and i blame the communicators in the island unfortunately i have to do this there's a like a lack of interest and indifference of what they don't come being the key facts right average person right too busy to go to the library and research right you know what i'm saying and this is where you come in this is how it's important for people like you and just i'm telling you and you still have a lot to do because i think this book is not even out yet is and and the interesting thing about this is that you know you write a book about something that happened back in the in the you know the th century the eighteen hundreds and you figure oh you know who's going to be interested in generation descendants of any they're casanova and these these women have now gotten together they have they've they've researched the genealogy they're interested in in in  producing you know information a book on their families how their fathers came from the canary islands from the canary islands to cuba and then to new york these women didn't know each other and  t this is the most incredible thing that the book has reunited a family for generations later i'm already thinking that there is a whole other group of women puerto rican women and latina women that no one gives credit to and those are the women who who are flight nurses and who were codebreakers during world war two and i've been writing about all i've been writing about them i haven't got a book yet but i'm thinking what a great story that would be for a young reader because i also have a children's book out that i keep forgetting about about growing living in long island and there was nothing that there was there was no no communities there that that that they thought that we were part of and so i wrote in this book about a little girl who's waiting for her  again and the mother is yelling out the windows at the kids the mothers putting pillows on the windows you remember always to put pillows on the windows so you could lean on remodelers and look out that was the know i remember sitting on the stoop i remember you know i remember the bronx with trees it was with friends it was friends all loads of friends alyan friends all english teacher how how how bad out there of course you always blame yourself you know so how bad could it be you know i didn't know that it wasn't the time when the timing  we weren't dealing with things like diversity and multicultural one by lingual ism and all of that then and so for forty years that little story was in a drawer somewhere let's see what we can do with it if you if we could you know if it's good well he published it and it turned out to be beautiful a beautiful beautiful little bit about you you know what you are a woman of fa thank you that sounds great