I am thrilled to be putting this issue in your hands. It is, as ever, a collection of singular short stories that celebrate the form and highlight its range, but it is also a gift at the end of a turbulent year—work to get lost in, work to be found in, work that in its celebration of emerging writers, and Black emerging writers in particular, encourages us to imagine everything that is yet to come: all of the chances we’ll have to see more brilliant work by the writers included here, none of whom yet have a book in print, and all of the chances we’ll have to celebrate and center Black writers who have found a way to make room for themselves while we wait for the world to catch up. By definition, an emerging writers issue believes in the future.
Still, when I was invited to guest edit this issue of American Short Fiction, I had a brief moment of hesitation. The issue was already in progress, slated as an emerging writers issue, when the editors reached out to me. They had accepted several of the stories included here, and, looking at the accepted work, they wondered how I would feel about coming on board to complete the issue as one focused entirely on emerging Black writers. I thought immediately and excitedly of the writers I’d be thrilled to publish, about how beautiful it would be to put these writers in conversation. I was glad the vision for the issue had come from a place of abundance, not scarcity, from how many talented Black writers were already on our radar and not from a belief that they needed to be searched for. But I also thought, It is 2020 and we are so tired.
I worried about the flood of calls for submission Black writers were getting over the summer. It was July—we were grieving the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on our communities and preparing for that grief to continue indefinitely in the absence of a plan or the will to stop it; we were in the streets protesting the latest public police murders, then back in the streets protesting the violence with which the protests were greeted; we were weary, hearing the sinister and familiar language being used to threaten our rights to speech, assembly, due process, and voting; we were weary of the labor it would take to turn the proliferation of expressions of love and support into more than empty gestures. So many of the calls for work by Black writers going out last summer were calls to respond immediately to recent events, as though any of us could adequately respond in real time to what hadn’t finished happening yet, as though many of us hadn’t already been writing work about what was happening all along, work that provided the kind of context the market now said it wanted, only to have that work ignored or dismissed. A part of me felt like I had no business asking anyone for art when what we needed was the safety of a space to rest.
But of course, believing that Black Lives Matter means more than setting the bar at basic survival—it means investing in space for Black people to thrive, investing in space that feels celebratory and liberatory and provides our work the freedom to name its terms. When I said yes, in spite of my moment of hesitation, it was because I envisioned an issue exactly like this one. In this issue are nine stories from writers at the beginning of extraordinary careers. Rickey Fayne’s “Spare the Rod” is an astonishing exploration of all of the ways that we are haunted, a story that at every turn unfolds to be something even more compelling and complicated than what it previously seemed to be—by its stunning and confident conclusion, it is hard to believe that this is Fayne’s very first published story. In “A Shameful Citizen,” Selena Anderson brings us an intimate portrait of Syreeta, the neighborhood oracle, whose second sight brings the world of the story into sharp, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking focus, but doesn’t give her a clear vision of the path toward her own future. Jonathan Escoffery brings us “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch,” a story that carries us to the inevitable catastrophe its title promises but depicts its characters with such life and tenderness that readers, like Delano himself, struggle to resist the inevitability of the outcome everything points to, looking for a way out even as reality stacks up against desire. Desiree C. Bailey’s “Sea Song” gives the much-sung-of ocean a chance to sing back, in a voice that is original, playful, lyrical, and revelatory. Gothataone Moeng’s “A Good Girl” is a beautifully rendered portrait of a daughter, her mother, her sister, and her dead father’s mistress, a story that spans years while never feeling anything less than perfectly grounded in time and place, introducing us to women who want to be loved even while knowing “love was dangerous, a bright-burning flame, it would lick us alive.” In “Capture,” Elinam Agbo gives us an immigration experience both as dazzling metaphor and beautifully rendered portrait of adapting to childhood in a new place. Dennis Norris II’s “Audition” brings us a confused father full of pride in his son’s abilities and anger about his recent discovery that his son has a boyfriend. Their trip to New York City for an important audition builds to a gorgeous crescendo, highlighting how quickly a moment can become bigger than we could have anticipated, how desperate and full of grace our attempts at salvation can be. Maya Perez’s “Pioneers” wonderfully bridges the past and the present—a woman’s chance encounter with a high school crush illuminates the difference between the way that she was lonely then and the way that she is lonely now. Finally, in “Snow,” Dantiel W. Moniz brings us a brilliant story of unexpected Florida frost, a parking lot at bar time, and a marriage trying to hold on.
One of the writers in these pages is being published for the very first time. Two have books scheduled to be published next year. Others have collected impressive credentials, including the Plimpton Prize and an appearance in The Best American Short Stories. All of these writers are people whom, if we’re lucky, we’ll be reading for a very long time. I am wary when, in times of trouble, people declare that we’ve lived through worse and will live through this. Not all of us did and not all of us will. But reading work like this reminds me that there will be a future and that future will be more than the grief we carry into it. If sometimes our present joy is like the joy in Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” the joy that every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed, well then we’ll take it, and we’ll celebrate.
—Danielle Evans
DANIELLE EVANS is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.