Desire Lines

"Thrilled to have this explosive and daring collection in my hands. More, please."—Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Devil’s HighwayDesire Lines is a fearless, lyric memoir-in-essays in which Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the submerged histories of the divine feminine, blending personal narrative, mythology, and cultural critique to reclaim women's voices, maternal power, and selfhood across generations. In her debut memoir, award-winning novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young seeks possibilities for women’s liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights. Desire Lines excavates submerged truths about motherhood, the body, and the sacred.Desire Lines takes its title from footpaths—of necessity, defiance and longing—that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Challenging herself to be a mother unlike what she has known, Millares Young centers her own body as a site of resistance and making.Tracing her matrilineage from Cuba to Spain, Millares Young uncovers the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was erased to make way for the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin. On the edge of an impasse, written as both invitation and veil, Desire Lines reclaims the power siphoned from women’s stories, wielding the lyric essay for awakening consciousness.

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year. Her essays and reviews appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Alone Together, and Broken Free. A former Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence, she is the editor of Seismic, a Washington State Book Award finalist. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Seattle.