Cleyvis Natera

Cleyvis Natera is a Dominican American novelist, essayist, critic, and teacher whose fiction examines family, class, migration, and the meanings attached to home. Neruda on the Park, her 2022 debut from Ballantine Books, follows the Guerrero family in Nothar Park, a fictional Dominican neighborhood in New York City facing rapid gentrification. Eusebia organizes increasingly risky efforts to resist luxury development, while her daughter Luz, a lawyer navigating professional ambition and cultural belonging, starts a relationship with the developer her mother opposes. Vladimir, husband and father, quietly imagines a return to the Dominican Republic. By moving among these competing visions, Natera turns neighborhood change into a family argument about protection, mobility, and obligation. The novel earned a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and a silver medal from the International Latino Book Awards for best first fiction. Natera later published The Grand Paloma Resort, extending her interest in Dominican communities, work, aspiration, and the pressures created by unequal access to power.