Aquaboogie

Author's Bio:

Susan Straight is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied with James Baldwin. She is the author of Highwire Moon (a National Book Award Finalist), I Been In Sorrow’s Kitchen and I Licked Out All the Pots, and, most recently, A Million Nightingales, among other books. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Award, and a Gold Medal for Fiction, Straight’s work has appeared in such publications as Harper's, Reader's Digest, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and on Salon.com, among other places. Straight currently lives in Riverside, California, where she has lived most of her life.

Quotes:

“Susan Straight is a remarkable writer—there is no new, emerging voice of the past decade more exciting, more surprising, and more richly and subtly human than she.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“A book by a writer whose love for her characters infuses her work with the dignity and urgency they so clearly deserve.” —New York Times Book Review

“Rarely is a black community so precisely, humanly, and searchingly delineated.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Straight] has taken the cadence and color of spirited voices, her community’s venerable oral tradition, and given it unequivocal form on page.” —LA Weekly

“[V]ividly captures people who know the rhythm of their own lives. They twist and turn on its beats, yet they remain partially submerged, trying not to drown.” —The Washington Post

“The dialogue in these stories flows like a river of talk, pulls you along with its rhythms until you’re in it.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Straight has created an entire world, and her small neighborhood is overgrown and lush with legends—hardly a dry river.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A world of pain and love and longing is contained in these stories.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review