Xochitl Gonzalez

Xochitl Gonzalez is a born-and-raised Brooklynite and one of America’s most preeminent storytellers. Prior to writing, she wore many hats, including entrepreneur, wedding planner, fundraiser, and tarot card reader, bringing a vibrant and enduring insight into the diverse New York experience that permeates much of her fiction and journalism. 

Gonzalez received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and the recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship for Fiction. Her debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, was published in 2023 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller and was named a most anticipated book of the year by Time.

Deeply inspired by her own culture and socioeconomic background, she describes: “From a Nuyorican and Puerto Rican perspective, I don’t know that I wrote it to correct anything more than I wrote it to have my community feel seen on the page without the burden of the prose explaining itself for the white gaze.” Gonzalez has since published the Reese’s Book Club pick Anita de Monte Laughs Last (2025), and, in 2026, Last Night in Brooklyn, a USA Today bestseller. Her first nonfiction book, Need Blind: A Memoir of Class and Climbing in America, is forthcoming in 2027.

Since 2021, Gonzalez has also been regularly contributing to The Atlantic; in 2023, she was made a staff writer. Her first newsletter, titled “Brooklyn, Everywhere,” discussed class and gentrification and was subsequently chosen as a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. In June 2026, Gonzalez was invited to speak by Ted Democracy Philadelphia; her talk, “How the Wealth Gap Is Reshaping Politics,” emphasized the “need to know each other, to have empathy outside of our backyard, and to cultivate compassion beyond our socioeconomic bracket.”