The World Over: Three Novels of Place

Brazilian novelist João Almino is the author of six novels, of which The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions, and the award-winning Free City are available in English translation. His next novel, Enigmas of Spring (Enigmas da Primavera), is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, and the University of Brasilia.  In Free City (Dalkey Archive Press), a worker disappears and may have been murdered the day Brasilia was founded. The book focuses on the social swirl of the city´s early years, when contractors, corporate profiteers, idealists, politicians and mystical sects mingled.

Susan Abulhawa was born to Palestinian refugees of the 1967 war. Currently living in Pennsylvania with her daughter, she is a human rights activist and frequent political commentator. She is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organization dedicated to upholding Palestinian children's right to play, even under occupation, and in refugee camps abroad. Her first novel, Mornings in Jenin, was an international success, with rights sold in twenty-five countries. In her latest novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury), a Palestinian family that has been violently pushed from their ancient farming village of Beit Daras, tries to reconstitute itself in a refugee camp in Gaza.

Vanessa Blakeslee's debut short story collection, Train Shots, is the winner of the 2014 IPPY Gold Medal in Short Fiction and long-listed for the 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Blakeslee's writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Globe and Mail, Kenyon Review Online, and Bustle among many others. Winner of the inaugural Bosque Fiction Prize, she has also been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Banff Centre, Ledig House, the Ragdale Foundation, and in 2013 received the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Her novel Juventud (Curbside Splendor Publishing) explores the idealism of youth, the complexities of a ravaged country, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.