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WORK TITLE: WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.alinagrabowski.com
CITY: Austin
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A.; Vanderbilt University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Nashville Review, TN, fiction editor.
AWARDS:Summer Short Story Award, Masters Review, for “Confirmation.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Day One, Wednesday Journal, Cleaver, Peregrin, Adroit Journal, Joyland, Masters Review, and Story.
SIDELIGHTS
Alina Grabowski is a writer based in Austin, TX. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University. Previously, she served as the fiction editor of the Nashville Review. Grabowski has written short stories that have appeared in publications, including Day One, Wednesday Journal, Cleaver, Peregrin, Adroit Journal, Joyland, Masters Review, and Story. Her story, “Confirmation,” won the Masters Review Summer Short Story Award.
In 2024, Grabowski released her first book, Women and Children First: A Novel. In this volume, set in the fictional town of Nashquitten, MA, a tragedy involving a local teen deeply affects residents. A teenager named Lucy Anderson falls while at a party and is videoed while having a seizure before she dies. The book is divided into two sections: one focused on the time before the tragedy and one focused on what comes after it. In the former, Grabowski explores Lucy’s relationships with her friends and classmates, including her best friend, Sophia. After Lucy dies, people close to her try to make sense of the tragedy. Her mother struggles, the PTA president overcompensates for the cruelties of her daughter, and Sophia finds a new friend.
Critics offered favorable assessments of Women and Children First. A Kirkus Reviews writer described it as “a smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.” Margaret Quamme, contributor to Booklist, called it a “craftily constructed and deeply moving debut.” “The ennui of small-town life is perfectly captured in the slice-of-life vignettes,” remarked a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. The same reviewer asserted: “Grabowski shows immense promise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2023, Margaret Quamme, review of Women and Children First: A Novel, p. 51.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2024, review of Women and Children First.
Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2024, review of Women and Children First, p. 26.
ONLINE
Alina Grabowski website, https://www.alinagrabowski.com/ (April 15, 2024).
Story Online, https://www.storymagazine.org/ (April 15, 2024), author profile.
Alina Grabowski grew up in coastal Massachusetts and holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University. Her writing has appeared in Story, The Masters Review, Joyland, The Adroit Journal, and Day One. She has received scholarships from Aspen Summer Words, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Alina Grabowski’s stories have appeared in the Masters Review, Joyland, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Peregrin Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and Day One, among others. has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute in 2017. She was a 2019 Emerging Writer Fellow at Aspen Summer Words and was an English Department/Curb Center Third-Year Fellow at Vanderbilt University in 2018-19. She was awarded an Emerging Artist Residency in Grinnell, Iowa by Grin City Collective in 2015 to work on a collection of stories. Her story, “Confirmation”, won the Masters Review Summer short Story Award. Her short fiction piece, “The Great American Road Trip”, was an honorable mention for the 2012 Adroit Prize for Prose.
In an interview with The Nashville Review, Grabowski shared her stance on writing emotion. She said, “As a reader, I am drawn to work that feels emotionally risky. Judy Claire Mitchell said that if you aren’t close enough to look into the gaping hole of sentimentality, then you aren’t close enough. I love this idea of sentimentality as a black hole. You don’t want to get sucked in, but you want to walk the edge of it. There is a tendency in student work and some contemporary work in general to veer away from emotion, because fear of sentimentality is so powerful—the result is that everything becomes very stripped down. That kind of work doesn’t resonate as much for me.
Characters typically have a pretty clear sense of what they’re feeling at a given point. Emotion is powerful, and we feel it in our bodies as well as in our minds. That’s something I want to reflect on the page, and I really admire work that is willing to rub right up against that… I think work is only sentimental when it’s reaching for the easiest possible emotion and when that emotion is the only point… I think what I admire in the work that I love and that moves me is that there are these deeper layers, and that’s I think what makes the characters feel so complex and so living… So, I try to write my way deeper and deeper and deeper.”
Grabowski earned her B.A. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She went on to earn her M.F.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis on Fiction from Vanderbilt where she served as fiction editor of the Nashville Review. She taught fiction and creative writing and led writing workshops for individuals impacted by cancer.
Hailing from coastal Massachusetts, Grabowski lives in Austin, Texas. She is currently at work on a short story collection and a novel that explores a local tragedy through the eyes and voices of ten different women.
Updated June 2022
QUOTED: "a smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short."
Grabowski, Alina WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST SJP Lit/Zando (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 7 ISBN: 9781638930785
A debut novel set in Nashquitten, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside town.
A teenager named Lucy Anderson dies under mysterious circumstances at a party after a video clip of her having a seizure circulates on social media. Grabowski's novel traces a constellation of relationships, some intimate and others incidental, between Lucy and 10 girls and women who narrate the stories of their lives. Jane, who attends the local public high school with Lucy, is having an affair with her math teacher and caring for her mother, who suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Natalie has managed to escape her hometown but ends up working for the tyrannical founder of a San Francisco startup, a decision she begins to regret when she returns home to care for her sick mother. Mona, Natalie's best friend and old rival who told her to take the job, crosses paths with two of the girls who witnessed Lucy's accident. Though Mona knows one of them and can tell they're both in trouble, she chooses to do nothing. "[This] is the danger of girls," Mona thinks. "They look like deer when, really, they're wolves." This comment could just as easily describe Mona and many of the novel's female protagonists. Women suffer at the hands of men--besides the lascivious math teacher, there's also a coach who's sexually assaulting students--but they also betray each other. That's the case with Maureen, president of the high school PTA. She's a do-gooder who is trying to organize a memorial for Lucy, but she also has made a huge moral compromise to protect her daughter, who did something cruel. Each of the book's first-person sections takes its time, fully immersing us in the dreams of its narrator and how those dreams have been frustrated. Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski's exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel.
A smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Grabowski, Alina: WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185544/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3c337c1. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "The ennui of small-town life is perfectly captured in the slice-of-life vignettes."
"Grabowski shows immense promise."
Women and Children First
Alina Grabowski. SJP Lit, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63893-078-5
Grabowski's magnetic debut takes place in Nashquitten, Mass., a fictional seaside town south of Boston, where the death of a high school student sends ripples through the community. Each of the two sections, titled "Pre" and "Post," are narrated alternately by various women and teenage girls from Nashquitten before and after Lucy Anderson dies from a fall at a party. In the "Pre" chapters, Jane, a classmate of Lucy's, is having a secret affair with their math teacher. Layla, the school's academic adviser, spends time helping Lucy's best friend, Sophia, tweak her college application essay. Mona, Layla's roommate, works at a fish market with Marina, a teenager who witnesses Lucy's death. The tragedy raises questions for these and other characters: Did Lucy slip? Was she pushed? Did she have a seizure, given her history with epilepsy? The "Post" chapters offer potential answers while also mapping out the way Lucy's death reshapes the lives of those around her. Sophia shakes off her timidness as a new friendship blossoms with Jane, who remains hung up on their math teacher, and Lucy's mother tries to find closure. The ennui of small-town life is perfectly captured in the slice-of-life vignettes, which coalesce into a riveting set of Rashomon-style retellings. Grabowski shows immense promise. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Osteen, Duvall. "Women and Children First." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2024, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A781166256/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e449bbe3. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "craftily constructed and deeply moving debut."
Women and Children First. By Alina Grabowski. Jan. 2024. 320p. Zando, $28 (9781638930785); e-book (9781638930792).
In Grabowski's craftily constructed and deeply moving debut, ten girls and women in a decaying coastal Massachusetts tourist town respond to the death of a teenager at a house party. What happened to Lucy--an artist and outsider afflicted by epilepsy--gradually emerges from the ten thoroughly distinct points of view, including those of Lucy's best friend, her mother, the high-school principal, and other townspeople, most young adults who barely knew her. Chapters--each of which could stand as a short story on its own--hopscotch from the hours before, during, and after the party, and into the months that follow. As Lucy comes into focus, so do the insular town and surprising connections among the women, most of whom have mother-daughter issues at least as complicated as Lucy's. Grabowski so deftly depicts the web of relations in this oppressively tight-knit community that it becomes evident how life changes for one character reverberate even for those who would seem outside her sphere of influence.--Margaret Quamme
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Quamme, Margaret. "Women and Children First." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2023, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774988407/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4400e79d. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.