If I could state the novel’s central premise in one sentence, here it is: Intellectual freedom begins where interrogation is permitted. If I could add another distillation, it would be: Imagination, for me, is a moral practice—a way of seeing beyond self-preservation toward empathy.
We are excited to announce that the 2027 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Khadijah Queen, and the 2027 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Vanessa Saunders.
Curse Him, by Sophia Terazawa, has been selected by Kazim Ali as winner of the 2026 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish Curse Him in the Fall of 2027.
The Chimeras, by Joe Fletcher, has been selected by final judge Alvin Lu as winner of the 2026 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish The Chimeras in the Fall of 2027.
While Afterlife is in no way a memoir, it’s threaded through with family history, mostly about my next oldest sister, who in real life died in 2020. She didn’t die of Covid, but of some mysterious other illness during the gloomiest, harshest period of the first big surge of the pandemic. Because of the circumstances, I didn’t visit her when she was in the hospital, and our family didn’t hold a memorial for her for another two years. During this weirdly empty time, when I knew she was dead but still hadn’t marked her passing in a way that felt real, I began to approach incidents I would not have put on paper while there was any chance she could have read them.
