LAS MUSAS BOOK BIRTHDAY - This is the Year

Cover illustrator: Sam Rodríguez, Cover designer: Nico Gureli

Today we celebrate the book birthday of This is the Year by Musa Gloria Muñoz. We sat down with Gloria to learn more about this book.

Tell us about This is the Year:
This dazzling YA cli-fi written in prose and verse will speak to any reader struggling with the state of our world and how to understand their place in it.

Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed Goth and aspiring writer Julieta Villarreal is drowning. She’s grieving her twin sister who died in a hit-and-run, her Florida home is crumbling under the weight of climate disaster, and she isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to stay in a place that doesn’t seem to have room for her. Then, Juli is recruited by Cometa, a private space program enlisting high-aptitude New American teens for a high-stakes mission to establish humanity’s first extraterrestrial settlement.

Cometa pitches this as an opportunity for Juli to give back to her adopted country; Juli sees it as her only chance to do something big with her life. Juli begins her training, convinced Cometa is her path to freedom. But her senior year is full of surprises, including new friendships, roller skating, and first love. And through her small but poignant acts of environmentalism, Juli begins to find hope in unexpected places.

As her world collapses from the ramifications of the climate crisis, Juli must decide if she’ll carry her loss together with her community or leave it all behind. Told in gripping prose interspersed with poems from Juli’s writing journal, this genre-bending novel explores themes
of immigration, climate justice, grief, and the power of communities.

This sounds fantastic! Read more below...

What inspired you to become a writer?
I’ve always turned to writing as a means of exploring questions. When I was younger, I read a lot. I mean all the time. My dad introduced me to Carl Sagan’s Contact when I was about ten. We read it aloud together and after that, I wanted to read as much sci-fi as possible. Reading led to writing. For me, they’ve always been intrinsically connected.

What 3 words would you use to describe your book?
1. Hopeful 2. Funny 3. Emotional

Yes, this is a book about climate change, but it’s also about darkly hilarious goth teens, friendship and hope. Teenagers are always going to be teenagers, even, and perhaps especially, when the word feels like a tough place to call home.

What is the most important lesson you have learned as a writer until now?
Write the story you want to tell and not the one you feel you should. As a Latine writer, as a woman, as someone who lives in the South, there are many narrative brands that I felt like I had to write into when I was starting out. But like trends, labels are mostly there to filter, inhibit, and sometimes block the actual story you and only you can tell. More often than not, this is the story you are compelled to tell rather than one that feels required of you.

What 3 recommendations would you give writers who are starting out?
1. While drafting, find a good rhythm to spend a time writing on or off the page as much as you can. 
2. Find your writing community. I can’t recommend writing groups enough! Mine has been there with me through many drafts.
3. Know that revision is truly a rewriting and reimagining of the manuscript sometimes. It’s okay. The book will ultimately be better.

What is on your creative bucket list?
I’d love to sell the television and film rights for This Is the Year. And in 2025 I hope to finish and sell my adult novel.

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Photo credit: Jasman Wynn

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of Your Biome Has Found You,
Danzirly, and This Is the Year.  She is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, a Hedgebrook Fellow, a Macondista, and a Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow.

Find her on IG, FB, X, TIKTOK: @bygloriamunoz

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