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Venita Blackburn is an English instructor at Arizona State University. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Faultline, the Georgia Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship and a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2014.

2018 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists Offer Literary Lens on Human Experience
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2018
NEW YORK—PEN America announced the finalists for the 2018 Literary Awards today, revealing a diverse roster of authors and works to recognize today’s best literature and translation spanning genres and continents.
For the first time, the finalist pool for the prestigious PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction is comprised entirely of women, including Hannah Lillith Assadi for Sonora (Soho Press), Venita Blackburn for Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories (University of Nebraska Press), Carmen Maria Machado for Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Graywolf Press), Emily Fridlund for History of Wolves (Grove Atlantic), and Jenny Zhang for Sour Heart (Lenny).
The announcement also included finalists for the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Award for book of the year, one of the largest literary prizes in the country, established last year by the late author and oral historian. Addressing some of the key themes of our time, from fraudulent news to systemic racism, the list includes White Tears by Hari Kunzru (Alfred A. Knopf), We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World), Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press), Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young (Graywolf Press), and The Changeling by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau).
Ursula K. Le Guin, whose sudden death earlier this week has been deeply felt within the literary community, also appears on shortlist for No Time to Spare, nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
“It is fitting that our Literary Awards this year spotlight five new women’s voices in fiction, as well as a dazzling diversity of writers for our flagship Stein prize and in other categories,” said PEN America Executive Director Suzanne Nossel. “PEN America’s Literary Awards celebrate some of the greatest fruits of free expression—stories that inspire, spark empathy, and change minds. At a time when the fabric of our discourse is being torn by polarization, technological change, and political upheaval, literature has the power to help us see past impasse and imagine a different future.”
Winners of the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards will be revealed at the February 20 ceremony at the NYU Skirball Center in New York.
For over 50 years, the PEN America Literary Awards have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across such diverse fields as fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, and drama. With the help of its partners and supporters, PEN America will confer 24 distinct awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes in 2018, awarding more than $350,000 to writers and translators.
The full shortlists are available at: pen.org/2018finalists
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PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

December 13, 2016
Talking Fiction with Venita Blackburn, 2016 Pushcart Prize Nominee
by Bridget Dooley

Bridget Dooley (BD): First of all, thanks so much for allowing me to ask you questions! I was struck by your story in our Summer 2016 issue, “Ravished,” particularly in how humor creates intimacy and in how complicated the sisters’ experience of loss is. The death of a mother is such a specific and hugely emotional experience, one that’s difficult to write about without getting maudlin or sappy. What do you think a writer needs to do to write successfully about this magnitude of grief? Are there any particular writers who have taught you how to achieve this feat of balancing such heavy emotional weight?
Venita Blackburn (VB): You’re very welcome! I’m overwhelmed by the responses I’ve gotten to “Ravished.” I’m glad readers are feeling the feels that I feel—ha. It is kind of a funny story. Humor usually follows a certain formula: sincerity + absurdity = hilarity. There’s nothing more sincere than grief, especially in grieving a truly loved one, as is the case with the sisters in this story. Loss like that is not easy to hide; we aren’t wired to conceal it—the hurt is wrenched out and changes us in ways that are often unpredictable. Couple that sincerity with the unpredictable, and humor pops out. I managed to get the congregation at my own mother’s funeral to laugh out loud with stories all while I felt delirious from the pain.
I suppose the authors I cherish most share that sensibility: Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Márquez (plus David Foster Wallace to some degree). Of course they are demigods of the literary world, while my mortal self can only reflect in awe. In their work I find a frankness about life, where beauty, violence, glory, and horror are often interchangeable in tone. Morrison always scares me with the most benign of objects, but then again she writes about frightening times. Garcia Márquez makes stunning the most tragic things. I reference Remedios the Beauty of his One Hundred Years of Solitude often in my own writing—her ascension into heaven, gripping a sheet; how the people witnessing the miracle of a woman literally being taken from earth into the sky had one thought, to ask for the sheet back because the living have needs. It’s hilarious. I find that outlook very calming. It’s also indicative of how writers engage in constant negotiation between observation, experience, and wild speculation. I try to balance the tug between all three without getting torn apart, but even that can be fun.
BD: From the first line of “Ravished,” there’s a link created between love and a kind of bodily violence, which bears out in the sisters’ dialogue about visceral sicknesses that might feel akin to romance with an imagined, idealized boyfriend. Was this a conscious link for you, between love and the grotesque, or between love and death? The moose who goes un-killed was my favorite detail of the story, and it seems to undo the inevitability of the sisters’ death-through-love that’s set up in the opening. Can you tell me a little about what the moose was to you? Is it a hopeful moose?
VB: Wow! I think you’ve just psychoanalyzed me in a way that I am not prepared for. I’m delighted! A link between love and a kind of bodily violence is a terrific idea and is definitely in the story, but I didn’t include it consciously. Now that I think about it, I link the two a lot. There is something unabashedly violent about love; there’s so much helplessness and yielding involved. Love is this force that we can’t see, which governs our whole outlook on ourselves and others, and on personal senses of value—all absolutely terrifying, catastrophic, and wonderful. While writing “Ravished” I tried to think about the things that children might find marvelous and frightening when it comes to relationships. The imagined love interests are male because that’s what they witnessed with their mother, and in the young sisters’ minds these amorphous lovers start out as vessels of hope and surrender and disappointment. But the sisters eventually grow up and, like all of us, realize their parents’ fallibility. The habits and failings and triumphs or our mothers and fathers don’t have to be our own, but they are something to remember. For me the moose served a dual purpose as a creature that would endure the imagined masculine violence of love and also exist as memory, an emblem of the sisters’ feelings about their mother. The mother was always somewhere in between dying a victim of someone else’s disregard or just living a good life. Or, more simply put, her lovers let her live.
BD: The dialogue between the sisters is so snappy and satisfying in its rhythm, and tells us so much about their relationship. I found myself reading their back-and forth aloud to myself a few times, just savoring their repartee. They know each other so well, and it’s wonderful that the most intimate love in a story that’s ostensibly about romantic love is actually between two siblings. Did you model these sisters off of other siblings, whether real or fictional? The sisters in your story “Scars” have a uniquely close and bodily relationship, too. Can we expect more siblings from you in the future?
VB: Hey, you read “Scars”! Yeah, I do that kind of thing. I write about sisters a lot even though I don’t have any. I have two older brothers, and they just don’t fulfill my sister fantasy at all (I love them, sure, but they are bros). Once a student of mine wrote a story about siblings that was just so loving and kind and perfect and everyone in the room that had siblings rejected the pairing completely, but I understood his intention. I too imagine a loving and caring and devoted sister relationship and envy those that have it, but I also recognize the tumultuous nature of life, so I always drop these girls and women into uncomfortable situations where their commitment to each other feels like life or death. I can safely guarantee that I’ll write about sisters again in the future.
BD: The way that time moves in “Ravished” feels smooth and natural, yet you cover a huge span in very few words. It’s like loss and coping with loss collapse the sisters’ experience of time. Can you tell me how you conceived of time in this piece? Does time move as a function of loss, or something else? Did this start as several scenes that you wove together?
VB: I’m glad you noticed this! I love when short short stories cover large swathes of time. My favorite flash fiction work does exactly that: for example, “A History of Everything Including You” by Jenny Hollowell and “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace. Another of my short shorts, “We Buy Gold,” covers multiple generations of a storefront before settling on the main narrative. In “Ravished” the chronology is reversed—the main characters and narrative are established and then great leaps forward and backward are taken. I use that structure often on stories I know are going to be very short. I want something epic in there, the way songs and poems can feel like they extend out beyond the limitation of any one moment. In “Ravished” what did come as surprise to me is the evolving dialogue between the sisters that solidified the last scene. I had a few lines—the ones about the karate kicks and the kittens—just come into my mind, and I dropped them in early on; the lines were so funny to me that I knew they belonged there, to introduce the sisters’ dynamic right away. I also realized they fit well into the story as links between the sisters’ two selves (childlike expectant innocence and the experience of loss and reality).
BD: I was stoked to read in your interview with American Short Fiction that you’ve been thinking a lot about mutants. Mutants offer the exploration of themes that are, I think, really pertinent to today, especially when it comes to the disgust society shows to progress. Are you working with literal mutants, or with characters who are mutants in other ways?
VB: Aren’t we all mutants somehow? I mean every person on a cellular level is a deviation from a previous form, whether from our parents’ physical selves or, as adults, from ideologies and philosophies that are imposed on us in our youth. We can’t help but be freakish versions of that which has come before. But that doesn’t always translate to the grotesque. In my collection there is a running theme about superpowers, and I had this idea about giving every character one of the worst superpowers imaginable, the thing that would be wielded in a way more crippling than heroic. Technically, that is true about even the “coolest” powers; the value is determined by the person with the gift. And on a lighter level, it’s still fun to imagine all the mistakes and disappointments we experience as a direct result of some uncontrollable ability to talk to turtles.
BD: Congratulations on winning Prairie Schooner’s 2016 Book Prize! What can we expect from your upcoming collection, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes? Mutants? Siblings? Are you working with pieces similar to “Ravished”?
VB: Thank you! The collection is full of short short stories with a similar sensibility to “Ravished,” though not identical of course. There will be 21 or 22 stories total in the collection, so many are structured to do that thing I like so much—to feel a little bit epic in a tight space, to cast tendrils that crawl far out into the past and also speculate about the future. And—you read “Scars”—you’ll see those characters resurface in other stories because I like them so much.
BD: As you know, GR just published work by Pulitzer Prize–winner James Alan McPherson, in our Fall issue. Was there anything about his work that influenced your own? Do you see yourself as a literary descendant of McPherson’s in any ways, or are you taking fiction different places?
VB: I’m excited about the inclusion of McPherson’s work in the issue and recently read his featured essay “On Becoming an American Writer.” I love reading the nonfiction work from my favorite writers, especially about eras in history that I am removed from by time but not always by circumstance. In the essay, McPherson discusses the “contracts” that are composed and handed to people like him, like me, like us all. We’re afforded positions of privilege or limited by these outside forces, depending on what they are. In order to function in a society like ours that governs itself with these contracts—in order to receive the benefits of those contracts—we must belong to “a group, subscribed to some ideology,” as McPherson says. Without that prescribed group identity, mere existence becomes problematic. And in McPherson’s “Elbow Room,” there’s a kind of self-consciousness, a perpetual self-doubting that he points out and lays bare in the very form of the story. This perpetual feeling seems a universal psychosis—so, not unique to the artist but explained by him, and confounded by elements like race, gender, and sexuality. It’s difficult to determine if it’s society that has the mental illness or the individual. I wouldn’t call McPherson my personal literary progenitor, but the world he dared to point to and explode into pieces on the page left behind the fragments that I’ve gathered into my own universe.

Venita Blackburn earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 2008. Her stories have appeared in Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, American Short Fiction, Devil’s Lake Review, Bellevue Literary Review, audio download through Bound Off, and others. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Arizona. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and Pushcart prize nomination the same year among other accolades. In the near future, she hopes to complete two novels and a collection of stories all currently in progress and somehow about the misuse of super human abilities.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, Devil’s Lake Review, Nat.Brut., Bellevue Literary Review, audio download through Bound Off and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and three Pushcart prize nominations. In 2016 she received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction 2016, which will result in the publication of her collected stories, "Black Jesus and Other Superheroes," in 2017. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her Master in Fine Arts from Arizona State University in 2008 and is finishing a new novel, "Guts." 

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
Venita Blackburn
University of Nebraska Press (Sep 1, 2017)
Softcover $17.95 (168pp)
978-1-4962-0186-7
Blackburn’s prose is simply exquisite—every word weighty, every sentence stripped of excess, with all remaining wonderfully descriptive.
Venita Blackburn makes an indelible impression with her first collection of short stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes.
The impressively credentialed collection bears a title that might seem to indicate stories that traffic in genre, but Blackburn’s writing revolves around people in everyday straits—with an occasional touch of the fantastic, and a depth of character that makes every tale engrossing. She focuses on people with abilities (a twisted take on superheroes in “The Immolator”) and disabilities (a teenager in a wheelchair in “Brim”) alike.
Blackburn’s prose is simply exquisite. Every word is weighty, every sentence stripped of excess, but all is wonderfully descriptive. In comparing skin tone, one character notes, “We were the same color, oxygenated apple meat.” A girl is described as having “never been able to disagree. With the personality of a candy dispenser, she will give all she has if you tilt her head and will grow to please many men.” A window is “frosted over by age and carbon dioxide from the procession of a thousand mouth-breathers over decades.”
Perhaps because they showcase the scalpel-like precision of her writing, the most impressive of Blackburn’s stories are often the shortest. Eight run no longer than a couple of pages, yet each delivers a formidable impact, opening a window into a world, even just a crack—enough to tantalize, titillate, enough to make the audience love the characters and mourn their passing from the page. That is, until the next story introduces another glimpse into another world.
On the other hand, the longest (and final) story in this collection, “Run Away Screaming,” shows Blackburn’s skills with pace and dialogue, and hints at the potential of longer work in the future. Whether she embarks on writing novels or sticks with more short work along the line of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, Blackburn is a writer to watch, but more importantly, to read.
Reviewed by Peter Dabbene
September/October 2017