Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying and mental illness.

Meg Medina currently resides in Virginia and teaches at Hamline University’s Master of Fine Arts in Children’s Literature program. Medina is an award-winning and bestselling author of fiction for audiences ranging from children to young adults and the 2023-24 National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature. In 2016, her novel Burn Baby Burn was long-listed for the National Book Award while Mango, Abuela, and Me was named a 2016 Pura Belpré Author Honor Book. Merci Suarez Changes Gears, a 2019 John Newbery Medal winner, is the first novel in her well-known trilogy about a sixth grader navigating middle school and family. More recently in 2020, her picture book Evelyn del Rey is Moving Away won both the Margaret Wise Brown Prize in Children’s Literature and the 2021 Crystal Kite Award.

Medina, who identifies as Cuban American, often writes about the intersection between culture and gender. Reflecting on her past, she notes, “I spent a lot of time thinking that my being Hispanic was something I had to get past in order to be successful,” but she realized that her “culture and [her] roots were so entwined with [her] success” (Sutton, Rebecca. “Meg Medina.” National Endowment for the Arts, 2014). As a result, she wants kids to celebrate their identity and has led the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, not only spearheading the dialogue for more diversity in publishing but also contributing to texts that represent all voices, like the short story anthology Flying Lessons. Although her writing often takes the perspective of Latina protagonists, Medina’s work is universal, portraying the common struggles of growing up. She notes that “stories of universal experiences connect us all […] especially when we’re talking about writing for children: wanting connection with other people, of struggling to understand yourself, or pulling away from your family, of falling in love, feeling isolated and broken” (Sutton). In Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, Piddy exemplifies both the universal aspect of growing up—trying to belong and survive in a new school while experiencing bullying—and her specific culture within a Latinx community—celebrating music and dance.