How My Writing Was Finally Published In The New York Times
The road to reaching a huge journalistic milestone.
Like many a native New Yorker, I grew up reading certain legacy publications like El Diario La Prensa, The New York Daily News, and of course the paper of record… The New York Times.
When I dawned on me that I would like to write for a living, I figured why not eventually hit up the Times for a job? When I was an elementary school student, it seemed that easy. Jobs meant you “asked for one” and put myself “out there.” I wrote little stories in the margin of my notebooks about cats that lived on the mountainside my father grew up on in the Caribbean. I revamped Dominican folklore that my grandmother told me about, so I figured I had that whole writing thing down.
I went to graduate school on the same block as the New York Times, and the graduation ceremony was in the New York Times. So I figured there was an inkling of a chance to get into the Times. But the more I learned about media, the more I learned how hard it was to be employed period in an era of mass layoffs.