Janelle M. Williams’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Kweli, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an associate director of programs and outreach at Writopia Lab, a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine, and a nonfiction editor for Inkwell Journal. In Gone Like Yesterday (Tiny Reparations Books), two Black women – Zahra, a college prep coach, and Sammie, a teenage girl and budding activist soon off to college – are drawn to each other through the songs of gypsy moths. They have been singing the songs of Zahra’s ancestors to her for years, and Sammie might be a moth person, too. When Zahra’s brother, Derrick, goes missing, she panics. So she and Sammie go to Atlanta, Zahra’s hometown, in search of her brother and to uncover what the moths and their ancestors want with them. Using magical realism to explore the experience of being a Black woman in today’s America, Gone Like Yesterday asks what we owe to our families, what we owe to our ancestors, and what we owe to ourselves.
