Standout Authors Unbound amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers and indie authors to disrupt an industry that rewards conformity over authenticity.
What if the life you’ve already lived was the most compelling story you could ever tell?
Adela Dalto Moraux has performed in 42 countries. She’s lost a husband, raised two sons, cleaned houses when times got hard, earned a master’s in mental health at 50, and built an anthem for Latina women almost by accident.
And she wrote all of it down.
Her memoir, Embracing Life: One Stage at a Time, is exactly what the title promises: a life lived in stages, each one teaching something the next one needed.
In this conversation, Adela shares what compelled her to finally write her story, what the music world never tells you, and why she believes sharing is the most powerful act of change there is.
Highlights
Your family doesn’t know your story. Neither does the world.
Adela grew up in Gary, Indiana. At 19, she married a jazz musician and moved to New York City. And once she left, she rarely went back.
“Nobody really understands me when I go back home. They think that it’s a glamorous thing. Yeah, it could be glamorous, but usually musicians don’t have houses or cars. We’re usually trying to work and usually that money is for you to live on.”
That gap between how a creative life looks from the outside and what it actually costs on the inside is exactly why she wrote her book.
Her family knew she was a singer. They didn’t know the rest.
The show must go on. Until you decide it doesn’t have to.
After losing her first husband, Adela did what she had always done.
She pushed herself from the back burner to the front.
She kept working. She raised her boys. She put them through college. She kept singing.
And then, at 60, she thought she was done performing.
Then Cuba called.
“When I got back from Cuba, I felt that my life had gone full circle. A little bit of publicity, people start calling you again. Before you know it, you’re singing again, you’re working again.”
For Adela, the ending she thought she’d written was really just another stage.
The writing life isn’t glamorous either. But it’s worth it.
Adela is candid about what putting a book together actually looks like.
Late nights. Three a.m. bursts of momentum. A head that felt like it was going to explode. A Spanish translation that took just as much out of her as the original.
“A book is, my God, it’s so much work. I mean, it was two years of pretty much intense work because you’re trying to meet your deadline, you’re trying to keep going because if you stop, a month might go by before you get that energy rolling again.”
She also learned the hard way not to delegate her own story.
“You own your book. You own your story. You own your life. Before you send it out, you should go through it again and again.”
Inspiration doesn’t wait for the right moment.
One of my favorite parts of this conversation is when Adela talks about where songs come from.
A patch of water outside a hotel window in Japan became a song about a girl crying on the beach in Ipanema. A morning spent looking at the sun became a new track. An anthem for Latinas in business came to her three days before the gig.
“Those inspirations, they flow. They flow through you. You might come up with a verse or two verses or just a hook. You already have a form, you have an idea.”
The lesson she keeps returning to: write it down. Whatever it is. Before it disappears.
Role models change everything.
Long before the memoir, Adela started a website called MujeresLatinas.com. She wrote short profiles of Latina heroines. She created a workbook for young girls. She mentored.
All of it came from a single statistic she read in the New York Times about dropout rates among Latinos.
“I said, how embarrassing. I have to do my thing. I have to help. I don’t have daughters. I’m just going to treat them all like daughters.”
She wanted young Latinas to see themselves in someone who had already done hard things. Because she never had that.
“If you have somebody that looks like you, it’s easier to follow. You believe in them more because you feel that you’re closer. So you have a chance also.”
Sharing can create change.
At the end of the conversation, I asked Adela what she most wants readers to take away from her book.
Her answer is immediate.
“Sharing is the most important thing in life. Sharing can create change. That’s what I say on my website. It’s because they’re not getting the information that would stimulate them. So we have to share this.”
Seven decades of stories. Forty-two countries. One stage at a time.
And she’s still building.
Closing Reflection
Adela doesn’t talk about her life like someone summarizing a resume.
She talks about it like someone who has actually lived it fully, messily, and on purpose.
The most surprising insight was how much life gets compressed into silence: the the years nobody asks about and the sacrifices people assume aren’t there because the performer showed up and smiled.
Writing is how Adela closes that gap.
If you have your own author journey to share, leave a comment and tell us what resonated most.
Thank you Tomesha Campbell, Meli’s World: Songs & Sketches, Steena Hernandez, and many others for tuning into my live video with Adela Dalto Moraux!
