Ananda Lima is an alchemist. With a spellbinding touch, her writing transmutes the mundane into the extraordinary, summoning readers to journey alongside her through the complexities of a global life. In her debut short story collection, Craft: Stories I…
Seven years ago, we—Kate Schapira and Erika Howsare—published a collaborative volume of poetry, which no one bought. Kate has published half a dozen other books of poetry and teaches writing at Brown University; Erika has one solo poetry book…
Essay by Michelle Sinclair • If one were asked to compare the experience of reading to that of eating a dessert, would it be so far-fetched to connect reading flash fiction and enjoying a cookie? Both are “bite-sized” and…
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
I hold the things I need in my arms. Since the pandemic, I don’t use a basket. Today, I’m cradling a bottle of Advil gel caps, blue mascara, and a ginger lemon kombucha. Customer service associate needed in the…
Deesha Philyaw, acclaimed author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, is graciously serving as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 Short Fiction Prize. In this interview conducted over email, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler asks Deesha to…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
I began reading Clare Beams’s extraordinary work with her first novel The Illness Lesson, which follows young women at a newly founded school in nineteenth-century New England where the students begin to mysteriously fall ill. That novel brought to…
