Angel Cordero

I drive a tanker truck out of Tampa, Florida. I never planned to write a book.

I wrote Stay Down on late nights after twelve-hour shifts, because my brother Melo told me our story deserved to be told. It's a memoir of growing up in 1980s Brooklyn — Whipple Street, the Farragut projects, the welfare hotels. Six of us in a one-bedroom apartment. A father who drank. A mother who was sixteen when she married him. Government cheese lines, Conan Soup, and a kid's plan to stop the violence with a pipe under the bed.

It's for my brother Ruly, who loved every stray he ever found and didn't make it out. He was fourteen.

I didn't soften any of it. I wrote it the way I'd tell it to you across a table — plain and true. There's no big dramatic victory at the end. What I got was quieter and better: a steady home, a marriage, a son who never had to go to bed hungry. For where I came from, that's the whole win.

If you came up the way I did, you're not the only one.

Stay Down is available in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese.

— Angel Cordero, author of Stay Down (2026)