Amplify Presents: Natalia Sylvester ('Breathe and Count Back From Ten')

This event is presented in partnership with the Texas Book Festival. For information about this year's Festival programming (11/5-11/6), please visit www.texasbookfestival.org.

Please join Amplify in welcoming award-winning Texas Book Festival author Natalia Sylvester for a special reading and discussion of Breathe and Count Back From Ten.

This event is ticketed. One copy of Breathe and Count Back From Ten will be included with your free ticket. Attendees may be asked to confirm their attendance 24 hours prior to the event or risk forfeiting their ticket(s).

Event Details:

• Event starts at 6:00 PM.
• Event will include a reading and moderated Q&A followed by a signing line.
• Location: Amplify Credit Union's Esperanza event space.

Additional information:

• Free parking available.
• Masks are encouraged but not required. Amplify will provide hand sanitizer and masks onsite.
• Seating will be offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
• Amplify reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event as needed.
• For additional questions or concerns, please contact feedback@goamplify.com.

About Breathe and Count Back From Ten:

In this gorgeously written and authentic novel, Verónica, a Peruvian-American teen with hip dysplasia, auditions to become a mermaid at a Central Florida theme park in the summer before her senior year, all while figuring out her first real boyfriend and how to feel safe in her own body.

Verónica has had many surgeries to manage her disability. The best form of rehabilitation is swimming, so she spends hours in the pool, but not just to strengthen her body.

Her Florida town is home to Mermaid Cove, a kitschy underwater attraction where professional mermaids perform in giant tanks . . . and Verónica wants to audition. But her conservative Peruvian parents would never go for it. And they definitely would never let her be with Alex, her cute new neighbor.

She decides it’s time to seize control of her life, but her plans come crashing down when she learns her parents have been hiding the truth from her—the truth about her own body.

About the Author:

Natalia Sylvester is the award-winning author of several novels for adults and young adults. Chasing the Sun was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad and Everyone Knows You Go Home won an International Latino Book Award and the 2018 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Natalia's debut YA novel, Running, was a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection and a 2021 Rise: A Feminist Book Project List selection. Her most recent YA novel, Breathe and Count Back From Ten, is out now from HarperCollins/Clarion Books. A Maleta Full of Treasures, Natalia's first picture book (illustrated by Juana Medina), will be published by Dial Books in 2024.

Natalia's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina magazine, and McSweeney's Publishing. Her essays have been anthologized in collections such as A Map Is Only One Story and A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South.

Born in Lima, Peru, Natalia came to the US at age four and grew up in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, was a 2021 Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formerly a faculty member at the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.

About Amplify:

Amplify is an Austin-based credit union that provides digital-first banking to its members throughout Central Texas. In 2022, Amplify became the first financial institution in Texas to turn off all bank fees for its customers. As an Amplify member, it is now impossible to be charged a bank fee now matter how much money you deposit, spend, or save. Visit our website to help us end bank fees in Texas, one person at a time.