The University of Alabama Press is thrilled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Fiction Collective Two (FC2). An author-led press, FC2 has been a hub for artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction since its birth in 1974. Over the years, the collective has grown from a small band of founding members to a thriving community of more than a hundred authors.
To honor this momentous occasion, we invite you to the Fiction Collective Two 50th Anniversary Reading at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in Tuscaloosa, AL, on October 7, 2024, at 6 PM CDT. The evening will feature readings from six acclaimed FC2 authors, offering a glimpse into the bold and visionary work that has made FC2 a constellation of literary innovation. The event will kick off with a reception at 6 PM, followed by the readings at 7 PM. Admission is free, and all are welcome.
In this blog, you’ll find detailed biographies, headshots, and books of the featured authors, allowing you to familiarize yourself with these literary trailblazers before the event. Join us in celebrating 50 years of fearless storytelling with FC2!
Sarah Blackman
Sarah Blackman is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from the Washington D.C. area. Her poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Oxford American Magazine and The Missouri Review among others. She has been featured on the Poetry Daily website and anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology, Best New American Voices, 2006, Metawritings; Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, and xoOrpheus: Fifty New Myths.
The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.
“Hex is playful and self-reflective, mixing contemporary culture with folklore. … An unabashedly fantastical tale, Hex is a pleasure.”
—Foreword Reviews
The eleven stories and one novella of Mother Box, and Other Tales bring together everyday reality and something that is dramatically not in compelling narratives of new possibilities.
“Sarah Blackman is a wizard at rendering the odd intricacies of the domestic sphere. Her insights are stunning, her eye is keen, and her sentences are unbudgeably right. An excellent debut.”
—Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First
Michael Martone
Michael Martone is a distinguished emeritus professor at The University of Alabama and has dedicated over four decades to teaching and writing. After retiring from UA after 24 years, he enjoys the tranquility of his garden.
With more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction to his name, his work has garnered critical acclaim, including the Association for Writers & Poets prize in nonfiction for THE FLATNESS. His most recent publications are PLAIN AIR and THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF ART SMITH, THE BIRD BOY OF FORT WAYNE. Additionally, Martone has edited six anthologies of fiction and nonfiction.
In The Moon over Wapakoneta, Martone shows us how traveling across time zones from Ohio to Indiana is a form of time travel; how a beer bottle can serve as a kind of telescope, how Amish might power their spaceships with windmills as they travel through space and time. These stories capture the paradox of feeling that one is in the heart of the country while at the same time in the middle of nowhere, of natives who find themselves strangers in their once familiar, but now strange, lands.
“A playfully poetic exploration of place, proximity, relativity, and time. Refreshingly original and poignantly sentimental. A feast for the mind. Some of my favorite bits were ‘Four Yearbook Signatures’ and ‘Girl Who Cried Sweetly.’”
—Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water: Stories
Four is the magic number in Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter. In subject—four fifth Beatles, four tie knots, four retellings of the first Xerox, even the sex lives of the Fantastic Four—and in structure—the book is separated into four sections, with each section further divided into four chapterettes—Four for a Quarter returns again and again to its originating number, making chaos comprehensible and mystery out of the most ordinary.
“. . . Before I met Michael, I was forewarned of his forthright flare. These stories fortify my early impressions. We are fortunate to have them.”
—Jane Smiley
Michael Martone continues the author’s giddy exploration of the parts of books nobody ever reads. Michael Martone is its own appendix, comprising fifty “contributors notes,” each of which identifies in exorbitant biographical detail the author of the other forty-nine.
“This has to be one of 2005’s best, most interesting and hilarious collections of short stories, not only because of its bizarre, decontructionist format, but—for true lovers of literary fiction—its unique narrative as well.”
—Bookreporter.com
The Blue Guide to Indiana is an ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State. Michael Martone, whose trademark is the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, has created an Indiana that almost is, a landscape marked by Lover’s Lane franchises and pharmaceutical drug theme parks.
“Michael Martone is a man with a mission, a fabulous inventor of history and memory, landscape and people. His quirky, magical tours hurl the reader across the borders between fact and fiction into a country of the mind where what we desire and fear fills our senses. Take the tops off your convertibles and fly! Indulge your secret curiosities! Trust The Blue Guide to Indiana to point you to some of the most delightful places on the planet.”
—Melanie Rae Thon
Jess Richardson
Jessica Lee Richardson (Jess/she/her+) is the author of the collection, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides which won FC2’s Sukenick Prize. Short work has appeared online in the Commuter at Electric Lit, evergreen, Gulf Coast and other places. She was born in New Jersey, is a ’Bama alum, class of 2013, and has taught at Rutgers, Staton Correctional Facility, Coastal Carolina University, and is now an Associate Professor at Cleveland Institute of Art.
Jessica Lee Richardson’s debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides teems with double magic—families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely.
“This book has heart and heft and heat and equal doses of wonder and quirk to keep us on our toes, not knowing what might be waiting for us, not just on the next page but inside the next sentence. Richardson’s tongue is an organ of the eye. Her prose sings cleanly, her ear hears with its hand not just cupped around it but it reaches out to pull us in and hold us all a little closer.”
—Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish, We Make Mud, and The Singing Fish
Vanessa Saunders
Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and [PANK] among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University.
In The Flat Woman, women exclusively are blamed for the climate crisis. Seagulls drop dead from the sky, and the government, instead of taking responsibility, scapegoats a group of female ecoterrorists. When a girl’s mother is incarcerated for climate crimes, she is forced to raise herself alone. As a young woman, she begins a romance with an environmental activist whose passion makes her question her own role in the world. By turns hilarious, deadly serious, and completely absurd, The Flat Woman asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a world ripe with disaster.
“With deft efficiency, Vanessa Saunders lets a mini-matrix of motifs and characters mirror a society’s worth of ecological, political, and personal crisis. A beautifully constructed work of feminist realism.”
—Nell Zink, author of Avalon
Adam Tipps Weinstein
Adam Tipps Weinstein is a Software Engineer for the Utah State Board of Education. His book Some Versions of the Ice was published by Les Figues Press in 2014, and The Airship more recently (2021) by FC2.
The Airship is the entrancing fictional biography of Nathan Cohen, who was deported from the US in 1912 under the Alien Act and spent the first years of World War I on a passenger ship, shuttled between the US and Argentina.
“The Airship: Incantations is a gem of a book, a treasury of marvels awash with histories real and imagined, and sentences so dazzling one must read them aloud. Adam Tipps Weinstein’s intricate tale of a wanderer and his stolen dog is both moving and sublime. I don’t think I’ve read a book so original and so beautiful in years.”
—Mira Bartók, author of The Memory Palace: A Memoir
Kellie Wells
Kellie Wells is the author of Compression Scars, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize; Skin; and Fat Girl, Terrestrial. Her fourth book, God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, received the Sullivan Prize in Fiction. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction, and the Baltic Writing Residency. In 2022 she was awarded the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize for “My Dog Lenny Bruce.” She is a professor at the University of Alabama and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.
Fat Girl, Terrestrial is Kellie Wells’s story of Wallis’s odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.
“Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. She dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.”
—Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule and winner of the National Book Award
Excerpt: The Castle: A Novel by Seth Rogoff