You Were Watching from the Sand

• INAUGURAL WINNER of the Ann Petry Award from Red Hen Press!
• DEBUT COLLECTION! First publication of a Harvard graduate and Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA Candidate
• HAITIAN STORIES about the fantastical and the ordinary from a young Haitian American writer
• FOR FANS OF Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due and Things We Lost In the Fire by Mariana

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.