Keeping Quiet

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist, writer, and women's rights advocate. Her book Unsent Letters to My Mother won the Faulkner Society’s best nonfiction award. Her book My Mother's Funeral was nominated for the Latino Books into Movies Award. She is also the author of Looking for Esperanza, winner of the Social Justice and Equity Award in Creative Nonfiction; Nautilus Silver Award in the conscious media category; Best Women's Issues book at the International Latino Book Award; Best Social Studies book at the International Publishers' Awards; silver medal at the Book of the Year Award, BOYA, and was listed as one of the top ten best books by Latino authors. Páramo writes from Medellín, Colombia.

“These stunning essays by Adriana Paramo explore a topic sacred to writers: silence. What does it mean to be still in a chaotic world? she asks and finds that quiet can be sacred, terrifying, and restorative all at once. “But most of the time,” Páramo writes, “silence gives me something close to rapture.” Her prose illuminates the human condition while focusing on wide-ranging topics, such as being a mother, a person of color, an expatriate, a writer, a survivor. A beautiful and compelling work.” —Susan Muaddi Darraj, author of A Curious Land and The Inheritance of Exile“Keeping Quiet: Sixteen Essays on Silence is not a quiet book. It is a bold, yet deeply intimate voyage of discovery about a woman’s vulnerabilities transformed into profound inner strength. With elegant artistry, Adriana Páramo applies her considerable talents to probe her own complex history with silence, along with the harrowing stories of women bathed in destructive cultural silences. These fully engaging essays expose the precarious nature of silence that ranges from absence, the unknown, loss, and intricacies of language, to the silence of the divine. I was inspired and invigorated by this captivating book.” —Eugenia Kim, author of The Kinship of Secrets"Keeping Quiet listens to the silences we keep and asks us to ponder, with both rigor and compassion, why we keep them and whom they serve. In the fine tradition of feminist memoir, these sixteen extraordinary essays expand from the personal meanings of silences to their political ramifications, even as the book moves from revisiting the silences of a younger self to learning to hear the noiseless howls of others. As the protagonist crosses multiple borders (of nationality, race, class, culture, and language), she translates silences into speech with both complexity and clarity. Indeed, as she listens to speaking silences, she dives deep into contradiction, and shows us what it’s like to live within oxymoron in these oxymoronic times. At the intersection of social justice and art, Keeping Quiet is an elegant contemplation of self-imposed silences and an urgent injunction to hear the quiet resistance of the unspoken." —Deborah Thompson, author of Pretzel, Houdini & Olive