“Milk Blood Heat” - title story by Dantiel W.Moniz - from debut Collection Milk Blood Heat and other Stories- 2020

 

“Milk Blood Heat” - title story by Dantiel W.Moniz - from debut Collection Milk Blood Heat and other Stories- 2020

“My intention for this collection was to portray the fullness of the human emotional experience, especially when that’s uncomfortable or frightening to sit with. Even in those moments, there can be beauty.” Dantiel W. Moniz

With only ten days gone, April is already a wonderful Month for discovering  new to me Short Story writers who can stand with The best.

How do you Pronounce Knife is the Guilford Prize Winning debut 

collection of Souvankham Thammavongsa. The stories are about Laotian immigrants to Canada, their challenges and struggles.

I followed this up with an initial Reading 

in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. Right after my first Reading there was very exciting news.

Deesha Philyaw has won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

The collection was chosen for this year’s prize by judges Charles Finch, Bernice L. McFadden, and Alexi Zentner, and was selected from 419 eligible works of fiction by American authors published in 2020 the U.S. and submitted by 170 publishing houses.

“Deesha Philyaw speaks in the funny, tender, undeceived voices of her title characters, who have more in common perhaps even than they know, from love to loss to God,” the judges said in a statement. “In the group portrait that emerges, Philyaw gives us that rarest and most joyful fusion—a book that combines the curious agility of the best short fiction with the deep emotional coherence of a great novel.”

“Heat Blood Milk” by Dantiel W. Moniz centers on The friendship of 

Ava and Kiera:

“This is one of many differences between her and Kiera— that the truth about the two of them changed depending on which mother was telling it—and Ava often wonders if their differences are only because Kiera is white, or if there’s something more. Something beneath the skin. This year she’s become obsessed with dualities, at looking at one thing in two ways: Kiera’s eyes, strange and magic; her own sadness, both imaginary and pulsating.”

We see how they grow closer, race impacts them and their mothers.

We follow their Development for about ten years. Something tragic happens to one of them.

This story is set in Jacksonville Florida.  

DANTIEL W. MONIZ is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, a Tin House Scholarship, and has been named a "Writer to Watch" by Publishers Weekly and Apple Books. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon "Best Book of the Month" selection, a Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick, and has been hailed as "must-read" by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzefeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. She lives in Northeast Florida and currently teaches fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

https://www.dantielwmoniz.com/about

I was given a Review copy of Milk Heat Blood.

I highly endorse all three of collections to anyone wanting to read very high quality literature.  I Will be Reading all of their work.

Mel u

“