Gabby Rivera

About Gabby Rivera

Gabby Rivera grew up in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Martha and Charles Rivera, in a Puerto Rican and Pentecostal household. She began performing poetry at local cafes as a teenager before graduating from Goucher College in 2004. Rivera has worked as an editor at Autostraddle, an online magazine for LGBTQIA+ readers, and as a youth programs manager at GLSEN, experience that informs the community-centered themes running through her fiction.

In 2017, Rivera became the writer of Marvel's America, an ongoing comic book series starring America Chavez — described as Marvel's first Latin American LGBTQ character to headline her own title. The series earned a GLAAD Media Award nomination for Outstanding Comic Book and drew a personal note of praise from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Juliet Takes a Breath

Rivera's debut novel, Juliet Takes a Breath (2016), follows a young queer Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx who comes out to her family the night before leaving for a summer internship with a prominent white feminist author in Portland, Oregon. Semi-autobiographical in its concerns, if not its exact events, the novel became a touchstone of contemporary queer Latina coming-of-age fiction, resonating with readers looking for a protagonist navigating identity, family, and community all at once. In 2019, Rivera adapted the novel into a graphic novel illustrated by Celia Moscote, bringing the story to a new generation of readers.

Book Challenges

Both the original novel and its graphic novel adaptation have drawn objections in schools and libraries, centered on the book's same-sex relationship, sexually explicit scenes, and frank discussion of the body. Many challenges have grouped the book with broader efforts to remove LGBTQ-themed titles from youth collections as a category rather than assessing its content individually. Across both editions, Rivera's work is recorded in this catalog as challenged in 10 states and 26 districts.