NBC News anchor, correspondent and debut novelist Morgan Radford joined Avanza's Edgar Zúñiga to discuss her new novel, "Now, Then." Radford spoke with Avanza while holding her newborn daughter, just days after giving birth.
The novel follows Liliana, a young Black Cuban American woman from North Carolina whose experiences share some similarities with Radford's own life. Like Radford, Liliana is of Afro-Cuban descent, grew up in North Carolina and attends Harvard. As she navigates life on campus in the 1990s, she uncovers family secrets through letters written by her mother about her life in Cuba decades earlier as the country stood on the brink of revolution.
Radford said writing fiction allowed her to explore questions of identity, belonging and family history in ways that journalism often cannot. She also said she wrote the book with her daughter in mind, hoping she would remember that "she belongs in every space and every room that she enters, even when those places were not with her inclusion in mind."
A Spanish-language edition of "Now, Then" will be published in September. For more information, visit MorganRadford.com.
