Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories - Paperback

$17.95
$17.95
Skip to product information
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories
  • Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories - Paperback

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories - Paperback

by Venita Blackburn
$17.95
$17.95

Book Overview

by Venita Blackburn (Author)

2018 PEN America Literary Award Winner-Los Angeles
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways.

Venita Blackburn's characters hurl themselves toward the inevitable fates they might rather wish away. Their stories play with magic without the sparkle, glaring at the internal machinations of the human spirit. Fragile symbols for things such as race, sexuality, and love are lifted, decorated, and exposed to scrutiny and awe like so many ruins of our imagination. Through it all Blackburn's characters stumble along currents of language both thoughtful and hilarious.

Author Biography

Venita Blackburn is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in the newyorker.com, Harpers, Ploughshares, McSweeney's, the Paris Review, and other venues. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn's second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published in the fall of 2021.

Number of Pages: 168
Dimensions: 0.39 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: September 01, 2017
ISBN9781496201867
Author Venita Blackburn
PublisherUniversity of Nebraska Press
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2017
LanguageENG- English
Pages168
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Short Stories

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

More by Venita Blackburn

Dead in Long Beach, California

Dead in Long Beach, California - Paperback

Dead in Long Beach, California - Paperback

By Venita Blackburn

About Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn is the author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and How to Wrestle a Girl, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker online, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, and American Short Fiction. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. She lives in Fresno, California.

You may also like