Contributor Update: Ananda Lima

Congratulations to Ananda Lima on the upcoming release of her fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil! The novel with be available June 18th from Tor Books and is available for pre-order now.

Craft is a surreal literary linked short story collection revolving around the absurdity of our times, art, and writing, as well as a complex view of the immigrant experience. The stories are written by a writer who meets with the Devil again and again throughout her life, after sleeping with him at a Halloween party in 1999.

The book has already received significant praise:

“Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted.”

—The Kenyon Review

“My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.”

—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

Ananda Lima’s poem “Transa” can be found in Issue 20 of s[r]. She can also be found on her website and across her social media accounts: @anandalima: i | t | b | fb | @.

Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, ILShe’s the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

Ananda Lima headshot

Mother/land by Ananda Lima Explores Identity and Heritage

Mother/land cover

Congratulations are in order for contributor Ananda Lima, who just released the book of poems Mother/land! Incorporating English and Portuguese, the collection explores the nuances of ancestry, language, identity, and motherhood and dives in to how the confluence of them all can complicate or enhance life. Mother/land asks us to consider the aspects of life we take part in and those which are chosen for us.

Ananda Lima’s Mother/land is as much a mother’s grappling with how to raise her son amid the danger and violence of today’s America as it is an investigation of a daughter’s inherited, migrant Brazilian past. Lima’s poetry has the rare power to let us feel and “know the terror” of the present moment, while reflecting on ancestry and passing on familial legacy to the next generation. Her poems aren’t afraid to “shout ‘I’m an American citizen’ ” across borders and languages, while shattering the security of presumed identity and recognizing both the precarity and privilege of citizenship. Piercing and poignant, Lima’s voice and music stay with you, “undisturbed / by wind or water, there will always remain/ a footprint” guiding your way home.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Author of the Many Names for Mother

One of the poems, “Transa,” was originally published in SR. “Transa” is among the few poems in Mother/land that are connected with Brazilian music.

Mother/land is the winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize and is available from Black Lawrence Press. To learn more about Ananda, who has published several chapbooks, visit her website, Instagram, and Twitter. Also, find Ananda at one of her many upcoming book tour events!