Third in a series, this anthology of short fiction is written by contemporary writers of color. Edited by Deesha Philyaw, the collection features work by Noah Alvarez, Victoria Ballesteros, Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, C.G. Crawford, Monic Ductan, LaTanya McQueen, Jennifer Morales, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Pacheco, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Sarp Sozdinler, Sejal Shah, Dawn Tasaka Steffler, Sara J. Streeter, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Robert Yune.

While choosing stories for this volume of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, Philyaw wanted “weirdness, for sure,” along with “experimental” and “transgressive narratives.” In her introduction to the book, she writes, “The stories…gathered here are all this and more, in beautiful and unexpected ways.” The stories in this collection explore wooded areas, the desert, a basketball court, a shotgun house, trailer parks, the Osage Indian Reservation, and other locales critically important to the development of the stories and the characters therein. These stories explore region and place, to be sure, but they also deftly mine the psychological landscape of their characters and highlight the complicated experiences of those living in the rural parts of the U.S.

Guest Editor Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.