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For award-winning author, CSUB ‘feels like family’

Donna Barba Higuera to be inducted into Alumni Hall of Fame

By California State University, Bakersfield

January 29^th, 2025

Donna Barba Higuera developed a passion for creating and telling stories as a child, but it would be several decades before she would achieve her dream of becoming a published author.

Although she wanted to study writing in college, Higuera’s parents urged her to pursue a science career instead, leading her to study biology at California State University, Bakersfield and graduate with her bachelor’s in 1991 with a minor in chemistry.

“I felt this natural connection to writing and storytelling, but I did as I was told and I went down that path,” she said. “I worked really hard to understand the sciences.”

Higuera went on to have a nearly 30-year career as a licensed optometrist in Washington state, but storytelling remained a vital part of her life. She would often tell stories to her children and write short stories for them.

“It just kind of blossomed into me becoming a writer,” she said. “It wasn’t necessarily an accidental thing. I'd always been a writer and a storyteller, but that’s kind of where that path led.”

Higuera has published several children’s books, starting with “Lupe Wong Won’t Dance” in 2020 and “El Cucuy is Scared, Too” in 2021. It was with her third book — 2022’s “The Last Cuentista” — that Higuera reached a new level of success and notoriety after receiving the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association.

The medal is given to authors in recognition of their contributions to children’s literature and is the most prestigious prize in the genre.

“In that instant, I knew my life had changed forever, that people all over the world were going to know my name,” she said. “That was a strange experience, but in the most beautiful way.”

In recognition of her literary achievements, Higuera has been selected to be inducted into CSUB’s Alumni Hall of Fame this year, along with retired psychologist Janet Barnett Pierucci, Kern County Superior Court Judge Elizabet Rodriguez and Miramar International Real Estate and Investment CEO Dan Shanyfelt.

The inductees will be honored at a ceremony at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel on Feb. 20 in Bakersfield. Tickets for the ceremony are available here.

“Being inducted into the Hall of Fame is really humbling,” Higuera said. “(CSUB) feels like home, and it feels like family. It’s like going back home, and so it’s really humbling for this to happen.”

Higuera has stayed connected with her alma mater over the years, donating copies of her books to the Walter W. Stiern Library and returning to campus for an author event in 2023 after winning the Newbery Medal.

Higuera was also named CSUB’s 2023-24 Writer in Residence, through which she participated in an additional author event and a creative writing workshop.

Her husband, fellow middle-grade author Mark Maciejewski, said he appreciates the diverse careers and backgrounds of CSUB’s Hall of Fame inductees and is excited to see Higuera become part of that legacy.

“If you look at the roles of the inductees of Cal State Bakersfield’s Hall of Fame, you have a lot of business leaders, scientists, politicians,” he said. “I think that the fact that you have a literary luminary among those is just a testimony to how diverse the student body is and the experience of the students there. I think that the fact that she went there for a science degree and is now being inducted into the Hall of Fame as a contributor to the arts is just even more of a testimony to what a wonderful environment they’ve created at Cal State Bakersfield.”

'Books let me escape'

Magical. That’s the word that comes to Higuera’s mind when reflecting on growing up in the Kern County community of Taft.

“I think a lot of people think of it as this kind of dusty and boring little town, but as a child, it was this amazing and magical place,” she said. “It was a great place to grow up, it really was. I didn’t know the bigger world at that time, and I felt very safe and happy there. The people were kind and friendly. Anywhere I go, I’m always thinking about where I come from and how lucky I am to have grown up in a small town with such interesting characters.”

Growing up in such a quiet community often meant that Higuera had to create her own fun, which usually involved coming up with stories and games.

“I would lay out on the grass and look up at the clouds and wonder and imagine, and I would make up stories in my mind about other places,” she said.

Higuera recalled sneaking into Taft Pioneer Cemetery with her friends, looking at names on the headstones and imagining the kinds of lives they led.

“There were parts of growing up there that really kind of fostered storytelling for a lot of us,” she said. “I think that’s normal for kids. If there’s not a lot going on around you, you will make up your own fun.”

Higuera was also a voracious reader as a child, allowing her to escape to far-away worlds. When she became an author, she strove to provide that same kind of escape for children while addressing real-world issues that affect them in a safe, entertaining way.

“There are a lot of challenges in the world, and the reason that I think we need to let kids get lost in literature is because they see what we see, even if they don’t fully understand it,” she said. “And just like when I was a kid, books let me escape, and I think that kids today need that same escape and be able to go to scary places in a book from the safety of their own home or their classroom.”

As Higuera reached adulthood, her desire to tell stories never went away, even as life started taking her down an unexpected path. After graduating from Taft Union High School, she studied biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a short time before deciding to enroll at CSUB to save money.

“I didn't know what to expect when I arrived there, but it was great. It was nice being part of a small university because you were no longer just a number,” she said. “My professors really wanted us all to understand what we were doing, and so a lot of the work was very individual.”

One of Higuera’s favorite research projects involved studying the effect of cattle grazing on brome grass, which led her to collect samples of cattle saliva at her uncle’s ranch.

“These two worlds of mine collided, being at Cal State Bakersfield and coming from a family that was in farming and ranching,” she said. “My professors probably thought I’d lost my mind doing a project like that, but they understood, and they let me go in the direction that I wanted to go. I don’t think that could have happened at, a big university, and so my learning curve at Cal State Bakersfield was exponentially higher. I was held accountable by some amazing professors, and I’m really thankful for that.”

After graduating from CSUB, Higuera went on to earn her doctorate in optometry at the Southern California School of Optometry before moving to Washington with her family and starting her own practice, Bel-Red Vision Clinic.

“Optometry came a little bit by accident,” Higuera said. “I thought maybe I wanted to be a pediatrician, but going to Cal State Bakersfield and studying science, I just started narrowing down what it was that I wanted to do and landed on optometry.”

For award-winning author, CSUB ‘feels like family’

'One of those impossible things'

Higuera decided to write her first book, “Lupe Wong Won’t Dance,” after being inspired by her youngest daughter, who came home from school upset one day about having to do square dance for P.E.

“My first question was ‘There’s still square dancing in P.E.? Why hasn't that ended?’ And then I remembered feeling like she did when I was her age, like, ‘Oh, why do we have to square dance? This is silly,’” she said. “So I wrote a character who said and did the things that I think I wished I had said and done, and my daughter wished she could say and do.”

“Lupe Wong Won’t Dance” tells the story of a 12-year-old girl who hopes to be the first female pitcher in Major League Baseball and objects to having to participate in square dancing at her school.

Allison Remcheck, Higuera’s agent at Stimola Literary Studio, said she was immediately drawn to the book after Higuera sent her a draft of the manuscript.

“When I’m deciding which stories I want to invest in, I’m thinking about whether or not the author has written from a perspective I haven’t seen before and if they can change the way I think about people and the world that we live in,” she said. “I felt that she embodied an overwhelming empathy and an ability to connect with middle-grade readers where they truly are in their development and relationship with the world.”

Nick Thomas, executive director of publisher Levine Querido, first met Higuera at a writer’s conference in Oregon in 2017, where Higuera and other writers read the first few pages they were working on. After listening to her read from “Lupe Wong Won’t Dance,” he liked it so much that he asked her to send him a copy of the whole manuscript.

“I remember thinking, ‘wow, this woman is really, really funny and she can really, really write,’ he said. “I told her ‘This is really great. I want to read more and don’t send it to anyone else but me.’”

While Higuera has published subsequent books with other publishers including Abrams Books, Thomas published Higuera’s first book at Levine Querido. After the book went on to be successful and garner several awards, Higuera continued with Thomas at Levine Querido for her subsequent book, “The Last Cuentista.”

The novel is about a 12-year-old girl who is among a group of people chosen to travel to a new planet before a comet destroys Earth. When she wakes up on the planet hundreds of years later, she finds she’s the only person who remembers Earth because everyone else’s memory has been erased.

“The book is operating on all these levels. It’s asking these amazing questions about what does it mean to be human? What is a good society? How important is storytelling?” Thomas said. “The thing that I always come back to is just the imagination that she brings to the world-building and all the different ways that a story can go. Her imagination is second to none. It’s just an amazing book that really resonates with a really wide swath of people.”

Higuera didn’t quite realize how many people she’s managed to resonate with until she found out that “The Last Cuentista” was being awarded the Newbery Medal.

“I wasn't expecting anything,” she said. “I don’t think any writer would ever expect to win the Newbery Medal. It just seems like one of those impossible things.”

For Higuera, it was especially meaningful because it meant her book would stand with other winners that have become classics in children’s literature, such as “A Wrinkle in Time,” “A Bridge to Terabithia” and “The Giver.” Higuera recalled seeing books with the gold Newbery seal on it when visiting the library as a child.

“In that moment, to imagine that something I wrote and created was going to be one of those books and could mean for a child what those books meant for me — there’s really no way to describe it,” she said. “You can’t put that kind of magic in a bottle. I’ll never be able to go back and re-experience that moment.”

Seeing his wife suddenly become catapulted into the limelight was a disorienting experience for Maciejewski at first.

“It’s such a unique honor and so unexpected that you just at first kind of don’t believe it. And then you kind of grab on with both hands and just try and ride it out,” he said. “I think we’ve gotten to the point where we are better at handling it, but becoming famous suddenly definitely makes for an interesting ride.”

Remcheck said winning the medal is a lifetime achievement that will forever cement Higuera’s work and name in the history of children’s literature.

“Donna won the 100th award, and 100 years from now, because of this award, we will still remember her. We will still be able to look back at ‘The Last Cuentista’ and see how it helped us make sense of the world during a time that was stark during the pandemic,” she said. “So many children have now had the chance to read Donna’s writing, turning them into readers and writers who will one day give us the stories that tell us who we are and who we can be. This influence on the next generation is more powerful and more important than we can ever describe.”

Donna Barba Higuera, far right, holds her Newbery Medal and poses for a photo with her Nick Thomas, executive director of publisher Levine Querido, and her literary agent, Allison Remcheck. Photo courtesy of Allison Remcheck.

A leap of faith

Despite her first successes as an author, Higuera continued to work as an optometrist. After earning the Newbery Medal, however, she began contemplating making the leap to becoming a full-time writer, an idea she was both excited and frightened by.

“It’s not something I took lightly,” she said. “Winning the Newbery Medal made me feel a little bit more confident, but I didn't quit my day job. I kept seeing patients for a while. And then, after ‘The Last Cuentista’ had spent over 30 weeks the New York Times bestseller list, I was like, ‘okay, I think it's safe and I need to turn the page here.’”

Higuera said she was hesitant to end her optometry career in case her future books weren’t as successful.

“A lot of us were raised in the Central Valley from hard workers who never took anything for granted, and so I guess I always thought, ‘I can't just set that aside completely. What if this writing thing doesn't work out and I have to go back into seeing patients?’” she said.

The strong work ethic Higuera developed growing up is a big factor in her success, Maciejewski said.

“I think that growing up the way she did contributed to how hard she works, to her tenacity, to her can-do attitude about any challenge that's put in front of her,” he said. “I think that she had a very solid foundation of family and community that comes through in everything that she does.”

Higuera made the move to full-time writing in 2022 and went on to publish two more picture books as well as a novel set in the same world as “The Last Cuentista.” She credits her experience at CSUB as having one of the biggest impacts on her writing career, despite opting to study science instead.

“When people ask how Cal State Bakersfield influenced my writing career and I say, ‘well, I studied biology and chemistry there,’ they think that in no way did it influence my writing, but it is absolutely the opposite,” Higuera said. “In the science fiction and fantasy I write, the science is always running in the background. It influences all of my writing. If I didn't have that knowledge, I would not be able to write the books that I write, so it’s a huge part of it.”

That mixture of science and art was something that hit home with Higuera while taking an Abnormal Psychology class with Dr. Steve Suter. After mentioning to him that she was struggling with understanding the concepts of the class, he gave her some advice.

“He said, ‘When we’re dealing with the mind and we're dealing with people, not everything is literal. Not everything is going to have an equation that you can fall back on,’” Higuera said. “I go back to that lesson constantly when I’m writing characters and I’m thinking, ‘okay, not every character has an equation and people have different motivations.’”

Higuera has been keeping busy with several books in various stages of development, three of which will publish within the next two years. She has also spent a lot of time traveling the world to promote her books and speak with students. At the same time, she has kept her optometry license active and frequently volunteers at clinics serving those unable to afford eyecare.

“I’ve had the most magical past few years,” she said. “It hasn’t slowed down. Even when I think I’m done with something, there’s always something looming.”