Angela Valez "Tangled Roots & Wild Dreams" (w/ Lisette Norman)

We are thrilled to celebrate Angela Velez new novel Tangled Roots & Wild Dreams, set in Pittsburgh! Tangled Roots & Wild Dreams follows a 17-year-old teenage girl navigating grief, a blooming romance, and the question of her future after highschool. Velez captures our Pittsburgh community beautifully in this resonant story, and we can't wait to host her again. Angela Velez will be joined in conversation by local author, Lissette Norman.

Never Have I Ever meets Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute in this hilarious and moving YA coming-of-age about a girl juggling way too many lies, one very off-limits crush, and a secret summer internship—all while steering clear of the dreaded f-word: her future.

Ezzie Ramos is a champion secret keeper. Her brilliant-professor mami and nosy abuelita don’t know about her daily ritual (wandering the art museum), her college applications (hopelessly blank), or her summer plans (avoiding the dreaded f-word, a.k.a. her future, at all costs).

Ezzie’s biggest secret? She’s interning at Sprout, the urban garden she’s stunned to discover her father founded weeks before his death. All she knows about Papi begins and ends with his dazzling scientific research legacy—but what if he dreamed of a different path too?

With seven weeks to uncover who Papi really was, Ezzie must chase down every lead, even if it means tangling with Sprout’s star volunteer, Gabe McCalister, who couldn’t be more off-limits—or distractingly cute. But as Ezzie begins to put down roots at Sprout, she learns that secrets, like seeds, have a way of growing toward the light. . . .

LISSETTE NORMAN is an Afro-Dominican writer and author of the picture books My Feet Are Laughing, Plátanos Go with Everything and Abuela’s Library. She is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and attended the Hedgebrook and Millay Arts writing residencies. Lissette was also an Author-in-Residence through the National Book Foundation and the 2025 Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Artist-in-Residence. She is currently an MFA fiction student at the University of Pittsburgh.

ANGELA VELEZ is the author of Lulu and Milagro’s Search for Clarity and Tangled Roots & Wild Dreams. She grew up in Baltimore under the watchful eye of her Peruvian immigrant parents and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Durham with her mountains of quilting fabric, two plastic flamingos, and one wobbly disco ball. You can visit her online at angelavelez.com.

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