"When I was Puerto Rican," "Almost a Woman," "América's Dream," "The Turkish Lover," and 2011's "Conquistadora" are the texts that acquainted us with the bestselling, award-winning essayist and screenwriter Esmeralda Santiago. Now, Santiago is preparing to complete her latest novel; a presently unnamed work, which the Puerto Rican writer admitted is nameless because of her habit of creating "terrible" working titles. Twenty years after the publication of her first memoir, she has become one of the most recognized names and voices in Latino literature, and her works have laid the foundation for Puerto Rican identity in prose, particularly as an immigrant and a woman.

Santiago, who ultimately came to command English and used it in service of her craft, came to United States when she was just 13 years old as a non-English-speaker. The pages of "When I was Puerto Rican" tell this story, capturing her as a young, curious, and plucky rural Puerto Rican girl, the eldest among a growing collection of siblings. Adventurous, curious, and fearless, she challenged authority and attitudes at every opportunity.

When she relocated to Brooklyn, New York, she became a different person — a different Puerto Rican. She began to share her mother's fear of forgetting Spanish and never learning English, becoming mute. She had to navigate between being who she was and who she was becoming, and she became invested in integrating Latinos into the documentation of stories. The title of her first memoir captures the movement from what was and what would be; and the memoirs "Almost a Woman" and "The Turkish Lover" helped those with similar experiences feel "not so alone."

"You grow up to be a person in a place, and once you leave that place, your culture changes and you become a different person," Santiago told Latin Post.

She would be called "Americanized" during trips back to her native land by Puerto Rican residents who, themselves, failed to see how the commonwealth had begun to absorb the culture of the larger, influential mainland. Aware of her own transformation, and the transformation of her homeland, Santiago wrote stories about that change, though she wasn't always sure that people would care about stories relating to Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. As an avid reader, she noticed that there were no stories about people like her, later seeing that poets had taken the first steps for Latino writers, offering Latino realities to both doting and unsuspecting audiences.

"Latino literacy was born out of poetry," Santiago said, clarifying that while prose writers were still struggling with questions of relevancy, poets like Willie Perdomo and others active in the Nuyorican's Poets Cafe during the 1990s had begun sharing their stories. They weren't "stalling" or confronted with drawbacks about language; they simply moved through language, composing verses that worked English and Spanish into one sentence, creating pieces that spoke to Latinos on either side of the experience.

The shared desire to tell a story, to write about transitions and challenges, questions, and responses to racism, sexism and ageism was something that lived among the Latino writers involved with the Nuyorican's Poet Cafe, and is still alive in Santiago. The sole difference between then and now for her is that she's now confident that people want to read stories about Puerto Ricans, Latinos and Latino Americans. Beyond wanting to read more about people like her, her need to write was simply awakened by a desire to read, which Santiago reiterated was an invaluable experience.

"The infinite connection between your eyes as a reader and my hands as a writer is more intimate than anything, including love. It's an unusual relationship, because even though I may never meet you, the writer, you've given me your experience," said Santiago, who then mentioned Christina Henriquez and Mirta Ojito as authors who she has enjoyed reading.

Esmeralda Santiago is on Twitter and Facebook.

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