Natalie Baszile's debut novel, Queen Sugar, is forthcoming from Viking/Penguin. Natalie has a Masters in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and earned an M.F.A from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, where she received the Holden Minority Scholarship. Queen Sugar won the Hurston Wright College Writer's Award, the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship and was runner-up in the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley novel in progress competition. Natalie has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hedgebrook.
I wasn’t surprised to read recently that Junot Díaz, in last week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, named Krys Lee’s story collection, Drifting House, as one of the two best he’d recently read.