THAT THING WE DON’T TALK ABOUT — SHIPRA AGARWAL (fiction)
That Thing We Don’t Talk About is a novel-in-stories based in a small town of India. Through nine linked stories, it follows two characters over forty-three years as they uncover their respective family's secrets. Their lives get entangled in the lies they hear and the ones they tell to survive.
"The summer Neel found out what his father looked like was the summer he discovered that lizards leave their wagging tails behind if you hit them with pebbles, and that spittle travels the farthest if you tilt your head back a bit and squeeze your stomach in at the right moment."
Bio: Shipra Agarwal was a doctor who scrawled poetry between patients. Now, she is a Fellow of WNBA’s Authentic Voices Program and Assistant Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work appears in Witness, FlashFlood, Janus Literary, and a BIWOC anthology. This fall, Shipra will be the writer-in-residence at Firefly Farms.
THE TIGER’S PAW PRINT: A MEMOIR OF MYTH AND DESIRE IN THE HIMALAYAS — CALLA JACOBSON (cnf)
When a graduate student in anthropology journeys to the Himalayas, she never imagines she will fall in love, conceive a child in a cave above a river, and be faced with choices that will change everything she thought she knew about who she is and who she can become.
“The cave was a place unto itself, forged of earth and stone, filled with fire, enclosing a wild intimacy. Below us the river sang its scraggy winter song. Flame ignited us—but outside of our cave the world was cold with irreconcilabilities: who I was, who he was, what was possible.”
Bio: Calla Jacobson spent a semester in Nepal in 1984, an experience that led to many years of volunteering, working, living, listening, and researching—the latter supported by a Fulbright grant. She has a PhD in anthropology and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She lives in Colorado, where she grew up.
GOSSIP — KAUSHIKA SURESH (fiction)
Upon arriving at prestigious Briarswood College, Jayashri, a first generation Indian-American student, finds herself involved with The Eight, the school’s infamous secret society. Gossip is a novel about girls, and all the secrets they hold. What is gossip but the first form of fiction?
"It’s Jayashri Muraliskrishnan and no, she will not pronounce it. No, she does not like wearing saris and no, you will never hear the sound of Salangai bells on her feet because no, she will never learn Bharatanatyam."
Bio: Kaushika Suresh is an Indian-American writer. They are the non-fiction editor for Black Warrior Review and their work has appeared in Joyland, The Master’s Review, and Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writers Series. They are currently at work on a novel about gossip, girls, and existing between cultures. @kaushikasuresh
FOR SUGAR — NED CARTER MILES (fiction)
K lives in an abandoned house on the flooded Dorset coast. She spends her days preparing a home for her soon-to-be-born baby, and satisfying a powerful sweet tooth, but when a melancholy priest and the encroaching sea arrive at her door, she learns that the world can be bitter, and yet still beautiful.
"Do you dream of breathing, Baby, safe as you are in my belly’s black waters? Is the world still wordless there? Would that I were with you in that still quiet, but once you’ve got words there’s no going back to the dark."
Bio: Ned Carter Miles is a writer and radio producer originally from Dorset, UK. and is currently studying for an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia. He was recently selected Editor’s Choice for the 2022 Raymond Carver Prize. @ncmiles
DOUGHNUT — SUE SWARTZ (cnf)
An exploration of number, narrative, biography, and memory centering the life of Solomon Lefschetz, handless immigrant topologist of the 20th century whose work helps explain how doughnut can morph into coffee mug (and back again). Written by a non-mathematician, complete with drawings & 1st person interviews.
“Queen of science, true spirit of Delight. Math scares me. Not as much as bungee jumping or breast cancer or Neo-Nazis, but still. At the mention of quadratic equation, matrix, manifold, I clench. In this I am not alone.”
Bio: Sue Swartz is a writer, visual artist, and seminary student living in southern Indiana. Her Torah-based poems and riffs, we who desire, was published in 2016; poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over a dozen publications. A perfect day would include trees, chocolate, grandkids, and laughter.
DREDGED FROM THE COURTYARD POND — ELISE THI TRAN (cnf)
Dredged From the Courtyard Pond is a collection of vignettes drawing from the oral history of a family’s escape from Vietnam and memoir of a daughter born almost twenty years later.
"I do not know how long it took to find her body— how long it took to realize she’d gone missing, how deep the water, how thick the weeds, if she slipped, barefoot, drawn too close by a rippled reflection, or if she wandered in past her depth, too young to even begin to comprehend the limitations of her own mortality. I do not even know her name, only that she was three or maybe four. Only that when my father’s family fled Vietnam, they left my aunt, her grave, behind in that seaside town, in a forgotten field, left to drown again and again, year after year, in the high waters of the monsoon rains."
Bio: Elise Thi Tran is a Vietnamese-Filipina-American writer based in Chicago. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been published in the first Margery de Brus Anthology, the Kenyon Collegian Magazine, and Spry Literary Magazine.
THE CURATORS — MAGGIE NYE (fiction)
In 1915 all of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-years-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish superintendent Leo Frank. None more so than the “Felicitous Five,” a group of fourteen-year-old girls who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they build and animate a golem in Frank’s image.
“Our hands knew the flat thinness of his face, the soft tatters from repeated handling. We passed him often between us. We knew him with a silver pin through his forehead, sun-faded on the attic wall.”
Bio: Maggie Nye has published work in Pleaides Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, MacDowell, and the Saint Albans Writer-in-Residence program. She is a PhD candidate at FSU hard at work on her second novel: a strange, modern retelling of the Medusa myth.
AFGHAN AMERICANA — LEILA C. NADIR (cnf)
Afghan Americana is an intimate-geopolitical memoir that chronicles Leila Nadir’s coming-of-age as a mixed-race girl in an immigrant family haunted by colonial violences and unspoken traumas. The book excavates the messy networks of military, industrial, emotional, spiritual, racial, colonial, and ancestral legacies that dump so much debris on our burgeoning identities, imprinting secrets and denial in our bodies.
“When I was ten years old, my boobs started growing, and the new mosque opened on Westfall Road.”
Bio: Leila Nadir is an Afghan-American writer and artist obsessed with possibilities for collective memory and repair after the ecological disruptions, geopolitical violences, immigration and exile, and colonial traumas. She is Founding Director of the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Rochester and holds a PhD in literature from Columbia University. @afghanvegan
CANDIDS — CLAUDE CLAYTON SMITH (fiction)
In this novel, a typo determines a life. Taylor wins the prestigious Edward Weston Award with a photo of a sand dune mistakenly entered as "Nude." This leads to a teaching position at a girls' finishing school, where he marries Angela, a feminist English professor, whose untimely death unmans him.
“Photography is fun. It’s not at all about pushing buttons or adjusting f/stops. It’s about learning how to see.”
Bio: Claude Clayton Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. His work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. He won the 2021 Great Midwest Fiction Contest of the Midwest Review.
THE BOOK OF UNSPOKEN RULES (or How to Become the Second Most Popular Girl in the Sixth Grade) — TARN WILSON (cnf)
Tarn is the new kid in school, one of the few White students at Whittier Elementary in Denver’s inner city in the raucous 70s. If she can learn the unspoken rules, she believes she’ll stay safe and invisible, but only by embracing her messy, confusing life can she truly live.
“Our bus driver, Dee, is young and thin, with a puffy afro, and she smells like marijuana. She’s too small to drive the bus and has to use both hands to shift gears. She scrapes parked cars and runs over curbs and hits mailboxes. But she lets us sing and yell out the window and walk in the aisle. So Rule #1: Don’t tell anyone about Dee’s bad driving.”
Bio: Tarn Wilson is the author of the books The Slow Farm, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, and 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Your Creativity and Inspire You to Write. Her essays appear in numerous literary journals, including Brevity, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, and The Sun. tarnwilson.com
IF SHE DOESN’T EXIST, WHY DO I MISS HER? — GREG TEBBANO (fiction)
After a young couple lose their unborn child in an auto accident, the truth of the child’s paternity comes to light and what was to be the family home becomes the stage for a love triangle convened within a cage.
“All I could see of her was her head, floating there above the ragged sea of sheets and comforter and I realized that was how I also looked to her—the two of us survivors of a tremendous shipwreck and smiling at what we thought was our great luck.”
Bio: Greg Tebbano is employed as a grocery worker and, occasionally, as an artist. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, Meridian, Hobart, Pigeon Pages, Pithead Chapel and Zone 3. He has received support from Vermont Studio Center and lives in upstate New York. www.gregtebbano.com
AFTER THE LEVANTINES — LAUREN ALWAN (fiction)
After the Levantines centers on Sofia, matriarch of the Almasis, whose history of dislocation and loss spans Istanbul as a new republic and immigration to pre-WW2 Brooklyn. When the family settles in 1950s Los Angeles, Sofia finds stability, until late in life when she’s faced with
losing the home she loves.
"The words make no sense, like the English she heard during those first weeks in New York. She knows such a thing exists, has heard her mother speak of it, but can’t grasp the notion of death and birth in a single moment."
Bio: Lauren Alwan's fiction and essays have appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod International, World Literature Today, Catapult, and others. Her work has been awarded the Bellevue Literary Review’s Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and cited as Notable in Best American Essays.