Author tour for controversial ‘American Dirt’ is canceled
NEW YORK >> The publisher of Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel “American Dirt” has canceled the remainder of her promotional tour, citing concerns for her safety.
The novel about a Mexican mother and her young son fleeing to the U.S. border had been praised widely before its Jan. 21 release and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. But Mexican American writers have been among those strongly criticizing “American Dirt” for stereotypical depictions of Mexicans. Cummins is of Irish and Puerto Rican background and had herself raised questions about the narrative, writing in an author’s note at the end of the book that she had wondered if “someone slightly browner than me” should have done it.
“Jeanine Cummins spent five years of her life writing this book with the intent to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants,” Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said in a statement Wednesday. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.
“Unfortunately, our concerns about safety have led us to the difficult decision to cancel the book tour.”
Cummins, 45, had made a handful of promotional appearances since her book was released, but over the past few days the St. Louis-based Left Bank Books had called off an event and Flatiron had cancelled interviews in California. The tour for her heavily promoted book had been scheduled to last at least through mid-February, with planned stops everywhere from Seattle to Oxford, Mississippi.
Flatiron instead hopes to organize a series of town hall gatherings with Cummins and her critics, calling it “an opportunity to come together and unearth difficult truths to help us move forward as a community.” On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Winfrey confirmed that Winfrey will meet as planned with the author next month and that the discussion will air in March on Apple TV Plus. “American Dirt” was the third novel picked by Winfrey since she began a partnership with Apple last year.
“American Dirt” has dramatized ongoing issues of diversity in publishing that mirror criticisms of Hollywood. From publishers and editors to booksellers and agents, the book industry is predominantly white. Miller acknowledged that the novel “exposed deep inadequacies” at Flatiron and apologized for how the novel was promoted.
“We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland,” he wrote. He also referred to a picture that surfaced on social media from a promotional dinner last May, when table centerpieces included barbed wire decorations based on the book’s cover image.
“We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them,” Miller said.
Flatiron is a division of Macmillan and has had authors ranging from former Vice President Joe Biden to Winfrey, who also has her own imprint at Flatiron that is releasing an Alicia Keys memoir in March.
One of Cummins’ leading detractors, Myriam Gurba, tweeted Wednesday that she, too, had security concerns. She wrote she had received death threats because of her criticisms and added “Let’s talk about the SAFETY of MIGRANTS and LATINX ppl. That’s what that book was intended to do, right?”