The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes to discuss her award-winning story collection, Are We Ever Our Own. Gabrielle will be in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Artistic Director at The Writer’s Center.
RSVP below to receive login information (our virtual events are held via Zoom). FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online through the publisher.
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is a writer and teacher. She is the author of the forthcoming short story collection Are We Ever Our Own, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize and The Sleeping World (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 2016).
She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay Artists in Residency, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center and was a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, New England Review, The Common, One Story, Cosmonauts Avenue, Slice, Pank, The Collagist, NANO Fiction, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her story “The Elephant’s Foot” was a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2016.
Gabrielle holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a PHD from the University of Georgia. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.
About the Book
Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, the stories in Are We Ever Our Own move between Cuba and the U.S., tracing the paths of the women of the far-flung Armando Castell family.
Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. The owner of a professional mourning service investigates the disappearance of her employees. On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a young woman breaks into the mansion where she was once a servant to help the rebels and free herself. A musician in a traveling troupe recounts the last day she saw her father.
Linked by theme and complex familial bonds, these stories shift across genres and forms to excavate the violence wreaked on women’s bodies and document the attempt to create something meaningful in the face of loss. They ask: who do we belong to? What, if anything, belongs to us?