Chavisa Woods

Last updated

Chavisa Woods is a New York City-based author, and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

Contents

Background

Woods was born and raised in a rural farm town, Sandoval Illinois, and lived from 2000 to 2003 in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was a resident of the anarchist collective C.A.M.P. (Community Arts and Media Project [1] ). She moved in 2003 to New York City, where she resided and worked for A Gathering of the Tribes, art gallery-salon and small press, owned and operated by novelist and professor Steve Cannon. She now serves as the Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes, and the Editor in Chief of Tribes Magazine Online, tribes.org. She has written four full-length books, including a novel and two fiction collections. She is best known for illustrating the lives of those in the conservative, rural areas of the U.S.

Work

Chavisa Woods is a MacDowell Fellow and the author of four books: "100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism)" (Seven Stories Press, 2019), "Things To Do When You're Goth in the Country" (Seven Stories Press,2017), The Albino Album (Seven Stories Press,2013), and "Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind (Fly by Night Press, 2009)."

Woods primarily writes literary fiction. Her work has received praise from The New York Times , [2] Publishers Weekly, The Seattle Review of Books and many other media outlets.

Woods has presented lectures and conducted and workshops on short fiction and poetry at a number of academic institutions, including: New York University (NYU), Mount Holyoke College, Penn State, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard College, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn Tech, Hugo and the New School. She currently leads select writing workshops throughout the year through Hugo House and Catapult.[ citation needed ]

Awards

Woods received the Shirley Jackson Award in 2018, for a story in her collection, Things To Do When You're Goth in the Country. [3]

Woods was the recipient of the Kathy Acker Award in writing in 2018. [4]

Woods was awarded the Cobalt Fiction Prize in 2013 for her short work of poetic prose entitled "Things to do when you're Goth in the Country".

Woods was the 2008 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant for Emerging Authors.

Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind was a finalist for the 21st Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. [5]

Other publications

Woods has published prose and poetry in a number of magazines, including:

Fiction

Nonfiction

Documentaries

Book reviews

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jo Walton</span> Welsh fantasy/science fiction writer and poet

Jo Walton is a Welsh and Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She is best known for the fantasy novel Among Others, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012, and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian era novel with dragons which won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. Other works by Walton include the Small Change series, in which she blends alternate history with the cozy mystery genre, comprising Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown. Her fantasy novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award, and her alternate history My Real Children received the 2015 Tiptree Award.

Stuart Ross is a Canadian fiction writer, poet, editor, and creative-writing instructor.

Seven Stories Press is an independent American publishing company. Based in New York City, the company was founded by Dan Simon in 1995, after establishing Four Walls Eight Windows in 1984 as an imprint at Writers and Readers, and then incorporating it as an independent company in 1986 together with then-partner John Oakes. Seven Stories was named for its seven founding authors: Annie Ernaux, Gary Null, the estate of Nelson Algren, Project Censored, Octavia E. Butler, Charley Rosen, and Vassilis Vassilikos.

Eaton Hamilton is a Canadian short story writer, novelist, essayist and poet, who goes by "Hamilton", 2021 legal name “Eaton Hamilton" and uses they/their pronouns.

Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Daphne Gottlieb is a San Francisco-based performance poet.

Jan Steckel is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, who is also known as an activist in the bisexual community and an advocate on behalf of the disabled and the underprivileged.

Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue. Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago, In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Idra Novey</span> American novelist, poet, and translator

Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soma Mei Sheng Frazier</span>

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is a biracial American author living in the Syracuse region and serving as a professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, where she founded Subnivean. Until 2019, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as a 2017 San Francisco Library Laureate. Her award-winning fiction chapbooks, Don't Give Up on Alan Greenspan (CutBank), Salve and Collateral Damage: A Triptych, earned praise from Daniel Handler, Nikki Giovanni, Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea and others. Collateral Damage: A Triptych won the 2013 RopeWalk Press Editor's Fiction Chapbook Contest although, per Frazier's website, the first story in the collection was truncated by the publisher.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is an American poet. She is author of four poetry collections: In the Volcano's Mouth, which won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass ; and the limited-edition letterpress artist book The Other World, which won the 2019 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, designed in collaboration with Keith Graham. She was awarded a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Granta, Missouri Review, The Baffler, and Poetry.

Jen Currin is an American/Canadian poet and fiction writer. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she is currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia and teaches creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her 2010 collection The Inquisition Yours won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry in 2011, and was shortlisted for that year's Lambda Literary Award, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and ReLit Award. Her 2014 collection School was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinelo Okparanta</span> Nigerian-American writer

Chinelo Okparanta(listen) is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

Alex Leslie is a Canadian writer, who won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers from the Writers Trust of Canada in 2015. Leslie's work has won a National Magazine Award, the CBC Literary Award for fiction, the Western Canadian Jewish Book Award and has been shortlisted for the BC Book Prize for fiction and the Kobzar Prize for contributions to Ukrainian Canadian culture, as one of the prize's only Jewish nominees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carmen Maria Machado</span> American writer

Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.

Maureen Seaton is an American LGBTQ poet, activist, and professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami. She is the author of fourteen solo books of poetry, thirteen co-authored books of poetry, and her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls. Throughout her writing career, Seaton has often collaborated with fellow poets Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Kristine Snodgrass, and Samuel Ace.

<i>Things to Do When Youre Goth in the Country</i>

Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country & Other Stories is a 2017 collection of short stories by the American writer Chavisa Woods published by Seven Stories Press. Its stories focus on the lives of rural Americans, especially how their lives are affected by gender, class, and sexuality. Author Samantha Hunt described the book as "it's Murakami meets meth heads," in reference to one of the stories where the narrator returns home to find her family struggling with local meth dealers.

<i>The Albino Album</i> 2013 novel by Chavisa Woods

The Albino Album is a 2013 novel by the American writer Chavisa Woods published by Seven Stories Press. Termed "a queer epic" by the publisher and author, it is a picaresque coming-of-age novel following the adolescence of a young girl in the rural United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arisa White</span> American poet

Arisa White is an American poet based in Oakland, California. She is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, and Black Pearl, and the books Hurrah's Nest, A Penny Saved, and You're the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened.

K-Ming Chang is a novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2021. In 2018 she published a poetry collection, Past Lives, Future Bodies.

References

  1. "C. A. M. P. - The Community, Arts, & Movement Project exists to empower creative expression, and celebrate interconnection". stlcamp.org. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  2. "New & Noteworthy Memoirs, from Prison to Boxing to Sexism". The New York Times. 5 July 2019.
  3. "2017 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners". Locus. July 16, 2018. Retrieved August 25, 2020.
  4. "2018 Acker Awards". NY Acker Awards. January 21, 2018. Retrieved August 25, 2020.
  5. Cerna, Antonio Gonzalez (February 18, 2010). "21st Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary . Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  6. "Seven Gifts - Chavisa Woods - Writing". sensitiveskinmagazine.com. April 19, 2017. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  7. "Fit mit Sport – unionstationmag.com". unionstationmag.com. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  8. Go Magazine review
  9. "the fiction circus". fictioncircus.com. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  10. "Fiction Book Review: Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country by Chavisa Woods. Seven Stories, $23.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-60980-745-0". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  11. Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country, by Chavisa Woods - Booklist Online . Retrieved January 15, 2019 via www.booklistonline.com.
  12. "Prose Roundup". The Brooklyn Rail. December 14, 2007. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  13. Keckler, Joseph (October 10, 2010). "Book: Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind". GO Magazine. Retrieved January 15, 2019.