Ananda Lima with Daniel Tam-Claiborne

Ananda Lima, author of the award-winning poetry collection Mother/land, launches her short story collection. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut. Local author and friend of the store, Daniel Tam-Claiborne, joins Ananda onstage. In Craft, Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), and publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program and currently serves as a Program Curator at StoryStudio Chicago and a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, which described it as “one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago. Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. His debut novel-in-progress, Transplants, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and is forthcoming from Regalo Press (Simon & Schuster) in 2025.

Event Links

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2484157-0

Read More

View Less