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Venita Blackburn is an English instructor at Arizona State University. Her¿stories have appeared in numerous publications, including¿American Short Fiction, Faultline, the Georgia Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly.¿She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship and a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2014.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Black Jesus
Brim
A Savior, Belief, Tupac, and Balloons
We Buy Gold
The Hurt Will Make You Stronger
Chew
Take Me to the Water
In the Middle of Everything There Are Ribbons of Light
String Theory
A Brief Excerpt from the History of Salt
Ephemeros
Dog People
Barbers
End of the World
Ways to Mourn an Asshole
Rites
They Only Look Like They’re Smiling
The Immolator
There Are No Ninjas in the End
Hold ’til Warm
Ravished
Not Like You, Not at All
The Annie Oakley Gun Training for Women
Scars
Run Away Screaming
About the author
Venita Blackburn is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in the newyorker.com, Harpers, Ploughshares,McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and other venues. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published in the fall of 2021.
Summary
Chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways.
