Karen Heller: Philadelphia playwright relies on neighborhood for inspiration

"Q is for quemar, to burn a house to the ground beneath, making a block full of row homes like a smile that's missing its two front teeth."

Q is also for Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of Welcome to My Neighborhood!, possibly the only children's book celebrating the urban splendor of her former neighborhoods of North and West Philadelphia, as well as Chinatown.

The book, also published in Spanish, features illustrations by Shino Arihara and was edited by Arthur A. Levine, the man prescient enough to sign J.K. Rowling.

Welcome rejoices in the unvarnished splendor of the everyday. "B is for bottles that are smashed like falling stars. Broken bottles of black cherry soda bought at barrio bodegas." Or "E is for the echo of the elevated train. Or "P is for Porky's Point, my papi's favorite roast pig joint," at Fifth and Rising Sun.

"I'm kind of a landscape writer," said Hudes, 33, a two-time Pulitzer finalist for playwriting, and author of the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. "These places have a way of finding their way into my writing."

This book, and her plays, feature a mosaic of communities. Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue - the first in a trilogy inspired by her cousin and uncle, veterans both - includes North Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and Iraq.

Hudes, the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Polish Jewish father, grew up near 49th and Baltimore, an area she recalls fondly as an intoxicating pan-cultural stew. Her mother's family has significant roots around Second and Girard, where Hudes sat Saturday heralding its influence on her work.

"We're a big family, and it's a small community," said Hudes, who lives in Manhattan with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. Her mother and stepfather, Virginia and Sedo Sánchez, are community leaders.

"She is a true product of Philadelphia, and everything she writes is rooted in the city," says her step-aunt, Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez. "Her family were trailblazers in so many ways - artistic, business, political - and encouraged her to do whatever she wanted to do."

Aunt Eugenia "Ginny" Burgos, a Norris Square activist and gardener who died in 2009 and whose family serves as the source of the Elliot trilogy, inspired Welcome's "V is for the vegetable plot that used to be a vacant lot."