St. Pete poet laureate Gloria Muñoz talks debut novel "This is the Year"

Gloria Muñoz is beaming.

Her debut novel, “This is the Year,” is out and an early January book launch party at St. Pete’s Tombolo Books has drawn a crowd of more than 100. St. Pete’s first Latin poet laureate, Muñoz is a Colombian-American writer, translator, advocate for multilingual literacy, and, now, a novelist. 

Out on Holiday House, “This is the Year” is a YA cli-fi (young adult climate fiction) novel written in prose and verse. It deals with a plethora of emotions ranging from grief, poverty, dealing with climate change, and your place in an ever-changing world. Publishers Weekly calls it “[A] thoughtful read that ruminates on the precarious state of the world.”

83 Degrees caught up with Muñoz to learn more about her and the inspiration behind “This is the Year,” which she began writing in 2020. 

“I’ve been writing since I was a kid,” she says. “It all began with songwriting when I was about 10. I would fill notebooks with songs and poems. And then I attended the Poynter Institute’s Writers Camp, where I met working writers and journalists, which was really inspiring. I’ve been writing ever since.”

Muñoz has a bachelor’s from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s in fine arts from the University of South Florida. Her bilingual poetry collection “Danzirly” won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Macondista, or alum of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, and a Las Musas Mentorship. She’s a proud alum of the Tin House YA writers workshop. She has also written “Your Biome Has Found You,” another book of poetry.

What does writing mean to her?

“My writing is a way of asking questions,” Muñoz says. “Observing and listening to the world and the people around me help me understand imagery, narrative, and voice more as well. It works both ways. The world teaches me to write, and I write to make sense of the world.”

Muñoz co-runs Moonlit Música, a bilingual media company specializing in pre and post-production. As a full-service editing, film, sound house, and songwriting team, Moonlit Música creates audio to inspire and share stories.

As for the inspiration behind “This Is the Year,” Muñoz didn’t have to look far.

Provided by Gloria Muñoz“In Florida, we live through cycles where we have to prepare and recover from the destruction of climate change,” she says. “This year alone, Helene and Milton uprooted so many. Homes that are being gutted, torn down, and rebuilt because of weather. From my childhood to now, things have only gotten worse. When I set out to write ‘This Is the Year,’ I was thinking about the next generation and how their lives will be entwined even more with climate change. It’s hard to find hope when projecting into the future. I wanted to write a book that would try to find it despite the future state of the world.”

“I hope this book helps readers feel less alone,” Muñoz continues. “At the heart of the novel, there is community and all kinds of people who help Juli, the main character, through some of her darkest days. There are people all around us who are there to help, we may just have to step out of our comfort zones to find them. I also hope the book sparks a sense of urgency to show up for each other and for this beautiful planet.”

For more information, go to Gloria Munoz or @bygloriamunoz  on Instagram.