July 2019 Book of the Month
Sabrina & Corina: Stories
by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Published by: One World Imprint of Random House
ISBN-10: 0525511296
ISBN-13: 978-0525511298
SYNOPSIS:
Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.
“Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra Cisneros
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
BIO:
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. She is the author of the debut short story collection, Sabrina & Corina from One World/ Random House, a historical novel to follow. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Kali has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming.
Author webpage: https://www.kalifajardoanstine.com/sabrina-corina
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KaliMaFaja
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kalimaja/
July 2019 Conversations Book
Love War Stories
by Ivelisse Rodriguez
Published by: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN-10: 1936932253
ISBN-13: 978-1936932252
SYNOPSIS:
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES Award
Best Book/Most Anticipated Book/Recommended Read of 2018: Cosmopolitan.com, The Root, Electric Literature, Bustle, Book Riot, PEN America, PopSugar, The Rumpus, B*tch, Remezcla, mitu, and other publications.
Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love. Yet they are raised by women whose lives are marked by broken promises, grief, and betrayal. While some believe that they’ll be the ones to finally make it work, others swear not to repeat cycles of violence. This collection documents how these “love wars” break out across generations as individuals find themselves caught in the crosshairs of romance, expectations, and community.
BIO:
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is a 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. Her fiction chapbook The Belindas was published in 2017. She has also published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Obsidian, Label Me Latina/o, Kweli, the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is the founder and editor of an interview series, published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel ‘The Last Salsa Singer’ about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico.
Author webpage: https://www.ivelisserodriguez.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ivelissewrites
Facebook:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aracien11/
