Immigrant Writers

Dressing the Saints, the second selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series, vividly explores the lives of Cuban Americans. Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope. Old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can' t be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion. "Dressing the Saints is a beautiful collection of short stories that captures the losses, family allegiances, and ruptures of Cuban exile. Haunted by the past, richly detailed, and with a strong sense of place, each piece is a quiet portrait of dislocation, of the need to tell stories in order to survive." - Cristina Garcia, author of Vanishing Maps

In a collection of linked tales filled with irony, humor, and magic, Talking with Boys introduces an unforgettable cast of characters in the Pakistani diaspora in Houston navigating crises of their own making and beyond their control. Via generations and geographies, the stories expand from Houston into tales from the characters' pasts in Dubai and Lahore. A community of Pakistani immigrants distract ICE with unlikely bait. A housekeeper in a Dubai mansion plots to liberate her fellow indentured workers. In Lahore, an empty nester finds herself bound by more than a jinxed bracelet. Throughout, Tayyba Kanwal' s remarkable characters navigate economic upheavals, political turmoil, and personal betrayals to pursue love, plot for survival, and play subtle power games to triumph against patriarchal forces of all genders.

Sasha Hom's Sidework is a lyric, page-turning novella about a homeless Korean adoptee and mother of four. During her busy Sunday shift waiting tables, her customers- rock stars, locals, and the Grim Reaper himself- bring her face to face with larger issues of motherhood, suicide, environmental degradation, death, and belonging. In this thought-provoking and often humorous debut from award-winning author Sasha Hom, herself a Korean adoptee and mother of four, the protagonist loses her home when the intentional community/commune where she and her family used to live- off-grid, in a canvas tent on three hundred acres- is sold. Sidework takes place during a Sunday breakfast shift as the homeless hero waits tables at a popular ' Cash Only' diner tucked in the Redwoods, frequented by growers, rock stars, Dreamers, tycoons, and tourists alike. But with each order she takes, each interaction serves only to bring her closer to her ghosts. Unnamed and unknown, from far-off continents, they ask her what it means to be a good mother. Intricately woven, lyric, and atmospherically layered, Hom's debut marries the mystic and mythic with the mundane while taking on issues of immigration, colonization, climate change, homophobia, motherhood, and adoption.