NYWIFT Blog

By Mariana Valencia

Welcome to NYWIFT, Linda Nieves-Powell!

New York-based Puerto Rican multimedia storyteller Linda Nieves-Powell has spent nearly three decades creating culturally specific, character-driven narratives that center Latina identity. 

Her work spans theater, film, digital media, and the page, from off-Broadway stages to college campuses nationwide, from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab semi-finalist selection to a Simon & Schuster publication. 

Her Imagen Award-winning stage work YO SOY LATINA!  has been produced at more than 400 colleges across the country and off-Broadway. She is currently completing a screenplay called Idalis and Selenis Go Freestyle.

NYWIFT Member Linda Nieves-Powell

Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself? 

While I have directed and produced many theater and film projects, my first love is writing. I am a published author and an award-winning playwright. My platform has always been rooted in one purpose: lifting up the experiences of Latinas, our joy, our grief, our contradictions and our power.

What brought you to NYWIFT? 

Eight years ago, I stepped away from the industry to become an educator. From the outside, it might have looked like a detour. It wasn’t. I was at a crossroads. I needed to connect with a different community, find new stories, be of service, and deepen my own education, not just academically, but personally. I needed to discover other things about me.

Teaching writing taught me more about craft than writing alone ever did. I come back to this industry not just with more experience, but with more intention.

NYWIFT Member Linda Nieves-Powell up on stage at panel.

How has your Latin identity shaped your way of storytelling? 

My cultural identity is the reason I write. I love who we are. We are vibrant, layered, contradictory, beautiful and the full range of that has never been reflected back to us the way it deserves. And when I look at mainstream media, I still see the same one sided versions of us. We are more than one thing and I feel an obligation to put that on screen.

What characteristics and/or aspects in your writing connect you directly to the story? 

What connects me to a story is almost always personal. It starts with nostalgia or a moment that revealed something to me. It could be a memory, loss, a shift in how I understood my family, my community, or my own place in the world. Nostalgia is not just sentimentality for me. It is historical research.

Linda Nieves-Powell in an auditorium.

What is the most fulfilling aspect of embracing your Latin culture through your projects? 

The most fulfilling part is the moment I realize that the work has resonated with people beyond the intended community. In 2000, I wrote a play called YO SOY LATINA! About six diverse Latinas who show up at a “What is a Latina” workshop only to find out the facilitator isn’t arriving and they are forced to answer the question on their own. That show ran for 15 years off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, and across the college circuit.

I thought I was telling a Latina story. And I was. But what those 15 years taught me is that a specific story, told with enough honesty and authenticity, becomes everybody’s story. I remember a show in Omaha, Nebraska. A group of Muslim women from various middle eastern backgrounds attended. After the show they invited us to dinner, and somewhere between the food and the conversation I stopped being the playwright and became just another woman at the table. We laughed. We recognized each other. We had different lives, but we had similar experiences about being bicultural in America.

That happened city after city, campus after campus. Women who looked nothing like me on paper would find me after a show with tears in their eyes saying, “that is me”.

NYWFIT Member Linda Nieves-Powell

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in your career? 

The biggest lesson my career has taught me is that community is everything. Not networking in the transactional sense like the industry mixers, the calculated introductions. I mean valuing the people who championed my work before it was polished. Who passed my name along. Those who showed up. The ones who believed in you early deserve your loyalty, your attention, and your reciprocity

What project(s) are you currently working on that our readers should be on the lookout for?

I am adapting my novel Freestyle into a screenplay entitled Idalis and Selenis Go Freestyle. The screenplay is an ode to 80’s and 90’s movies and it’s about two thirty something moms who stop doing everything for everyone else long enough to ask who they used to be. One’s separated. One’s marriage is running on fumes. So they go back to Club 90, back to Lisa Lisa and C&C Music Factory, back to the people and places that made them feel like themselves before life got heavy. Only to find out that nostalgia can’t fix the present.

I have also completed a short film called Update about two phone-obsessed millennials on a first date who experience a power outage and are forced to get to know each other the old-fashioned way.

Connect with Linda Nieves-Powell on Instagram at @freestylewriter90 and on her website lindanievespowell.net to learn more about her current and future projects.  

(All images courtesy of Linda Nieves-Powell)