On the occasion of the awarding of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Rail Books section co-editors Elizabeth Lothian and Joseph Salvatore interviewed 2023 recipient Tyriek White about his debut novel We Are a Haunting. In their conversation, White discusses troubling the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death, writing a story about growing up in a predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, and how Brooklyn to him represents an attitude, a demeanor, and a set of principles.
Tyriek White is the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner for his debut We Are a Haunting. Set in East New York, Brooklyn, the novel follows Colly, a teen growing up in public housing who is left under the guardianship of an absent father when his mother dies from cancer. But since Key and Colly possess the same supernatural ability to see and communicate with the dead, they continue their bond even after her death. The novel alternates between Key s life in New York in the eighties and nineties and Colly’s from the early 2000s to the present day. White elegantly uses Key and Colly’s communion with ghosts to contextualize present-day fights against the gentrification of Black and brown communities and the city s systematic neglect of public housing within a larger history of Black displacement and forced migration in the Western world.
Fiction writer Meghan Gillis will be the fourth reader of the 2023/24 season for the celebrated Visiting Writers Series at the University of Maine at Farmington. Gillis will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 8, in The Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center. The reading is free and open to […]
Fiction writer Meghan Gillis will be the fourth reader of the 2023/24 season for the celebrated Visiting Writers Series at the University of Maine at Farmington. Gillis will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 8, in The Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center. The reading is free and open to […]