Aya de León is an Afro-Latina author, poet, performer, activist, educator, and editor. She identifies her family roots as Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian from St. Kitts and Nevis. Her work moves among spoken word, hip-hop theater, essays, children's fiction, and adult crime and suspense, with a consistent interest in how popular genres can carry stories about racial, gender, economic, and climate justice.
De León teaches creative writing in African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and has directed June Jordan's Poetry for the People program. She spent roughly a decade touring as a spoken-word and hip-hop-theater performer before returning to fiction after becoming a parent. Her account of that transition describes years of earlier novel writing, a difficult search for representation, and then a rapid schedule at Kensington's Dafina imprint that trained her to publish across several interconnected projects.
Undercover Latina begins de León's Factory series for younger readers. Fourteen-year-old Andréa Hernández-Baldoquín, raised in a family of spies, is assigned to pass as white and enter an Arizona high school so she can reach the estranged son of a white nationalist. The thriller uses espionage, gaming, comics, cosplay, code-switching, and a first crush to examine racism, colorism, privilege, identity, and belonging without surrendering the momentum or pleasure of an adventure story.
De León says the Factory emerged when she asked what young people of color would bring to the spy-girl tradition. Her politics and espionage developed together: the imagined organization protects people of color, while the young protagonists' missions create space for political education and for the first exercise of adolescent agency. She has also connected Andréa's ability to pass with her light-skinned Puerto Rican mother's experience of hearing racist remarks from people who assumed no person of color was present.
Her adult catalog includes the Justice Hustlers heist novels and standalone suspense novels about surveillance, corporate power, music, colonialism, and climate. Side Chick Nation, written after Hurricane Maria, connects a heist plot with Puerto Rico, disaster capitalism, gender violence, and climate change. A Spy in the Struggle places a Black FBI attorney inside a Bay Area activist organization, while That Dangerous Energy turns a love triangle into a climate-conspiracy thriller.
The Jane Addams Peace Association named Undercover Latina the 2023 winner in its Books for Older Children category. Kirkus gave the novel a starred review, praising its integration of social criticism with an accessible adventure and its rounded cast. These records support the connected Work's reception without treating publisher-repeated accolades or nominations as issuer-verified awards.
