About
Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. The collection is a 2022 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, a finalist for American Book Fest's 2022 Best Book Awards for Short Story, and a 2022 Foreword INDIES finalist in short fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead, 1996), has published feature personal essays in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and received writing fellowships at Playa and Ucross. Campbell is currently working on a second story collection, Free Radicals. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.
Featured Work
The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs
THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, is a collection of eight short stories. At its core, the book is about body-memory, the way we hold our pasts on our skin, visibly – bruises, scars, tracks, tattoos – and invisibly, over generations. Three of the eight stories focus on women's bodies, and the violation of women's bodies; in a fourth, "Triptych," we go back to the early 80s and the AIDS epidemic in a story about an artist/single mother and her dying neighbor; in a fifth, "Tasmanians," an Armenian-American woman tries to separate from the suffering she has inherited from her father and grandmother as well as a slew of relatives she has never known.
About this latter story, author Anthony Doerr wrote: "Tasmanians, shows better than any story I’ve read in a long time how genocide can ripple through time and haunt generations who did not live through it." About "Triptych," he wrote: "What a generous, complicated and big-hearted story. It is a story that means something, that increases empathy in the world…innovative and beautifully written…the writing is lovely and strange in all the right ways."
Other Works
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Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery
Riverhead Books, 1996
