(l-r): Samina Ali (photo: ZAKD) and Janice N. Harrington (photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)
Samina Ali (RJFWA ’99), Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival
(Catapult, March 2025)
“Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is a harrowing and redemptive memoir, in which a new mother must reconstruct her shattered mind, her relationship to her religious upbringing, and her life’s purpose.
“At 29, as a young writer working on her first novel, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. Miraculously, she survived the unchecked eclampsia that had endangered her pregnancy, instead sustaining major brain injury and falling into a coma as she gave birth. When she woke up, only her deepest memories were intact. Her husband was a stranger to her, she didn’t remember having a baby, and any language other than her native Urdu was foreign. Medical consensus was she would never recover—much less write—again. Ali pairs the story of her ‘death’ and recovery with the parallel narrative of her relationship to her Islamic upbringing and her fluctuating connection to her faith, incorporating meditations on religious narratives of death, the afterlife, resurrection, and reincarnation. Both deeply personal and steeped in religious thought, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is a uniquely propulsive, searching, and ultimately, inspiring work of memoir.”
Samina Ali is also the author of Madras on Rainy Days, which won the French Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction.
Janice N. Harrington (RJFWA ’09), Yard Show (BOA Editions Ltd., October 2024)
“Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, this collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity. Harrington’s speaker is a chronicler of yesterdays, using the events of the past to center and advocate for a future that celebrates pleasure and self-fulfillment within Black communities.”
Janice N. Harrington has published three previous books of poetry: Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, The Hands of Strangers, and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Cave Canem fellow. Also an award-winning children’s writer, Harrington teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. Yard Show is longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.