About
Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread (Engine Books, 2013), winner of the PEN/Southwest Award in Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction; it was also listed as one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine, was a “Summer Books” choice from Huffington Post, and the San Antonio Express-News called it one of the “Best Books of 2013.”Cuba co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and published other work in such places as Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Columbia, and Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row. Her story, “Watching Alice Watch,” was one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories (storySouth), and “When Horses Fly” won the George Nixon Creative Writing Award for Best Prose from the Conference of College Teachers of English. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine, and was featured in the Netflix docuseries, The Confession Killer. Cuba has received a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, an artist residency at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, and a San Antonio Artist Foundation grant. She was included in Texas Monthly’s “Ten to Watch (and Read),” received the Mind Science Foundation Imagineer Award, and was a finalist for the Humanities Texas Award for Individual Achievement. Cuba is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and for fifteen years, she was associate professor then writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University. Website: http://nancuba.com
Featured Work
Body and Bread
Years after her brother Sam's suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family's tenant farm and a young woman's life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family's history in Central Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist—images of sacrifice, ritual, and rebirth—haunt her waking dreams. In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.