Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Raquel Vasquez Gilliland returns with a voice that knows how to marry the earthbound and the ethereal, and in Dirt and Honey, she's crafted something that feels both grounded in soil and sweetened by longing. This is poetry that doesn't shy away from the mess—the grit under fingernails, the ache of bodies that carry too much, the way desire and grief can bloom from the same root. The collection moves through landscapes both literal and emotional, tracing the contours of identity, heritage, and the tender violence of becoming. Gilliland's language is lush without being precious, each poem a small ecosystem where the natural world and the human heart are inextricably tangled. She writes about family, about survival, about the ways we nourish ourselves and each other even when resources feel scarce. What sets this apart is the way Gilliland refuses easy binaries—dirt isn't just hardship, honey isn't just sweetness. Instead, she finds the sacred in the mundane, the resilience in what gets overlooked, and the beauty in what others might call broken. Her imagery is visceral, her metaphors drawn from gardens and kitchens and the quiet rituals that sustain us. This is a book for anyone who's ever felt caught between worlds, who knows that survival is its own kind of magic, and who understands that sometimes the most radical act is simply to keep growing.

This is a book that understands the weight of family stories. The ones that get passed down like heirlooms. The ones that shape you before you even know their names. Raquel Vasquez Gilliland invites you into the House of Vasquez, where generations of voices echo through the rooms. You can feel the warmth of the kitchen, the secrets tucked into corners, the ghosts that aren't quite gone. These are tales woven from memory and magic, from the everyday and the extraordinary. Each story pulses with the kind of intimacy that comes from knowing a place—and the people in it—down to the bone. Gilliland writes with a lushness that makes you want to linger, to savor each image, each revelation. There's heartbreak here, yes, but also resilience. The kind that runs in bloodlines. The kind that survives. This collection feels like sitting at a table with someone who trusts you enough to tell the truth, even when it hurts. It's about what we inherit and what we choose to carry forward. It's about home, in all its complicated beauty.

What happens when the universe you thought you understood cracks open, revealing something stranger and more wondrous than you ever imagined? Sia Martinez is about to find out. She's a Mexican American teen working at her family's roadside motel in the Arizona desert, a place where the sky stretches wide and the nights are thick with stars. Then one evening, she and her best friend Cayden witness something impossible: a UFO, bright and undeniable, streaking across the moonlit sky. What follows isn't just a search for answers—it's a reckoning with identity, belonging, and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from. Raquel Vasquez Gilliland weaves a narrative that feels both grounded and otherworldly, blending the ache of first love with the mystery of the cosmos. Sia's voice is sharp, funny, and achingly real as she navigates family expectations, her complicated feelings for Cayden, and the growing certainty that what she saw that night matters more than anyone wants to admit. The desert becomes a character in its own right—vast, secretive, alive with possibility. This is a story about seeing and being seen. About the courage it takes to claim your own truth when the world insists you're wrong. Gilliland delivers a debut that hums with magic, heartbreak, and the kind of wonder that makes you look up at the night sky a little differently.

What does it take to step out of someone else's shadow and claim your own light? Moon Fuentez has spent her life being invisible next to her beautiful, influencer sister Star, trailing behind her on a summer tour selling merch and watching from the sidelines. She's the plain one, the forgettable one, the one who exists to make Star shine brighter. But this summer, everything shifts when Moon meets Santiago Phillips, a brooding, talented photographer who sees her—really sees her—in ways no one ever has before. As the miles roll by and the tour winds through small towns and big cities, Moon begins to discover her own worth, her own voice, her own fierce beauty. Santiago's lens captures what she's been hiding from herself, and their connection deepens into something that feels like falling and flying at the same time. But family loyalty, old wounds, and the complicated dynamics of sisterhood threaten to pull her back into the shadows. This is a story about breaking free from the roles others assign you and learning that you were never the supporting character in your own life. Gilliland writes with tenderness and fire, crafting a romance that's as much about self-love as it is about falling for someone else—a journey toward believing you deserve to be seen.

This book understands grief. Not the tidy kind. The messy, haunted, eight-years-later kind that follows you home. Sage Flores ran from her family's magic the day her sister Sky died. Now she's back in her hometown, working at Cranberry Rose Company, using her gift to talk to plants while hunting for rare botanical specimens. The air smells like earth and old wounds. Her dead sister brings her coffee. Her living sister's rage literally summons lightning. The Flores women are cursed—every one of them touched by magic, every one of them marked by loss. Then there's Tennessee Reyes. He shattered her heart in high school. Now he's her partner in this plant-hunting project, and working beside him feels like slipping back into muscle memory. He's grown into someone new—mature, steady, impossibly attractive. The old tenderness is still there, but so is something electric and unfamiliar. Sage has no bandwidth for falling in love. She's got heritage plants to track down and ghosts to reckon with and a family curse that won't quit. But Tenn feels inevitable. Like standing in a field before a summer storm breaks. Charged. Dangerous. Exactly the kind of thing that could root her to this place—or destroy her all over again.

There's a particular kind of magic that hums beneath the surface of everyday life, waiting for the right person to call it forth. Raquel Vasquez Gilliland returns to her lush, enchanting world in this installment of the Order of Wild Things series, where the boundaries between the natural and supernatural blur into something altogether more dangerous and intoxicating. Lightning in Her Hands pulses with the kind of elemental power its title promises, following a protagonist who must navigate both the volatile forces she can summon and the equally treacherous terrain of her own heart. Gilliland's prose blooms with sensory detail—you can almost taste the ozone before a storm, feel the crackle of energy dancing across skin—while grounding her fantastical elements in deeply human stakes. This is magic as inheritance, as burden, as the thing that sets you apart even as you desperately seek connection. What distinguishes this from other contemporary fantasy is Gilliland's refusal to choose between the wild and the tender, the fierce and the vulnerable. Her characters contain multitudes, and the magic system feels less like a set of rules than an extension of emotion itself, unpredictable and raw. For readers who crave fantasy that tastes like summer storms and feels like coming home to a place you've never been, this is the kind of book that lingers long after the final page, electric and unforgettable.

A woman stands at the threshold between two worlds, her hands stained with soil and starlight. Raquel Vasquez Gilliland conjures a story where the untamed edges of nature press against the careful boundaries of the human heart, where magic isn't a distant fantasy but something that grows in the cracks of everyday life. The air here is thick with the scent of wild herbs and unspoken longing, a place where roots dig deep and secrets bloom in shadow. This is a tale of transformation and belonging, of characters who must learn that wildness isn't something to be feared or controlled but embraced. The magic here feels organic, rooted in earth and emotion rather than spells and incantations. Gilliland writes with a lush, sensory hand, building a world that pulses with life—both the kind that grows in gardens and the kind that stirs in the chest when someone looks at you like they see all your hidden parts. The stakes are intimate, the conflicts drawn from the messy, beautiful work of becoming whole. For readers who crave romance threaded with enchantment, who want their love stories to taste like rain and feel like coming home.