Out now: BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2021 and a li'l microchap

Being that it is solidly, pumpkin spicédly autumn now, it is long past time to announce some fruits of the summer literary harvest!

Cover art by Sirin Thada, art direction by Nicole Caputo

The Best Debut Short Stories series is now in its fifth year. This annual anthology celebrates the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever fiction publication.

I’m honored to be an official co-editor for the series, having been involved in some capacity since its inception in 2017. We celebrated with a new cover design, with art direction by Nicole Caputo and gorgeous original art by Sirin Thada. This year’s judges were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote, honoring twelve debut writers and their debut stories:

“Force, Mass, Acceleration” (The Southern Review), Heather Aruffo
“Good Girls” (Barrelhouse), Lindsay Ferguson
“The First Time I Said It” (The Georgia Review), Isaac Hughes Green
“Maria” (Waxwing Magazine), Amy Haejung
“The Math of Living” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Nishanth Injam
“Transit” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Khaddafina Mbabazi
“Re:Frankie” (Porter House Review), Mackenzie McGee
“The Strong-Strong Winds” (adda), Mathapelo Mofokeng
“Salt” (Michigan Quarterly Review), Alberto Reyes Morgan
“The List” (Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art), Stanley Patrick Stocker
“Taxi” (Midwest Review), Pardeep Toor
“Mandy’s Mary Sue” (Sine Theta Magazine), Qianze Zhang

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine is doing an interview series with all of the winners, which you can read here. Debut writers, nominations for the 2022 prize are open through November 15th, so ask your editor to nominate you if you’re eligible!

Digital micro-chap

Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe,” a wee chap of 10 poems, is available now via Ghost City Press.

Ghost City Press selected my digital micro-chapbook for inclusion in their 2021 Summer Series. If you're interested in poems as meditations, poems as trances, Baba Yaga, hacking into the mainframe, and repurposed public domain images, come on down! Available here for the low price of FREE, or you can hit that donate button.

Latest Internet as Intimacy column on podcasts and having real feelings, a Twin Peaks chapbook, and #shipwreckSF

Spring 2020: It’s been weird and painful. If you’re out in the streets protesting police brutality, thank you. If you’re wondering what else to do, here’s just one collected list of organizations to donate to.

In less important news, the second installment of my Internet as Intimacy column went up last month: “Podcasts and Tarot Reading Showed Me How to Be Real Instead of ‘Good’.” It’s pretty much what it says on the tin: listening to particular new-agey and writing-related podcasts, and diving into a regular tarot practice, made me finally confront a lifetime of shrinking for the sake of peace. This essay’s existence has complicated a relationship or two. But the outpouring of messages I received on Twitter and Instagram and from colleagues, the hurt and the healing that strangers shared with me, moved me immeasurably. I’ve never cried so many happy tears. Isn’t this why we write? To remind each other that none of us are alone, not really?

Happily, editors Kristin Garth and Justin Karcher accepted my poem, “The Orchid’s Curse,” for inclusion in this beautiful hand-bound chapbook from APEP Publications. These Poems Are Not What They Seem (available here) is a collection for fans of Twin Peaks, and people who are generally into poetry, the supernatural, and uh, highly stylized acting. My poem is about Donna’s strange, sensual performance of desirability in the home of Harold, The Guy Who Loves Orchids, Diaries, and Privacy.

I wrote porn again for #ShipwreckSF. This was formerly an in-person event at The Booksmith in San Francisco, cohosted by Casey Childers and Amy Stephenson, before she moved to NYC. In mid-April, Amy got the proverbial band back together (meaning amazing smut-reader Baruch Porras-Hernandez and a ragtag crew of previous participants) for a Booksmith fundraiser. We wrote ridiculous fanfic of Jane Austen’s Emma, and, because we were (and are) self-quarantining, the event was called Homewreck. I did not win this time. I did not even place, because Joe Wadlington, Nate Waggoner, and Molly Sanchez are too funny. Maybe someday the episode will be uploaded as an episode of the ShipwreckSF podcast. And maybe, if you are not related to me and are not a child I have tutored, you may listen to it.