Recipient Information
Location
Carrboro, North Carolina
Medium
Fiction
Year of Award
2024
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowships
Grant Amount
$5,000
Joanna Pearson’s debut novel, BRIGHT AND TENDER DARK, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury on June 4, 2024. Her second short story collection, NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards. Her first short story collection, EVERY HUMAN LOVE (Acre Books, 2019), was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and many other places. Originally from western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.
Artist Statement
My story collections, EVERY HUMAN LOVE and NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL, represent fairly well what I’m interested in as a fiction writer— as one friend put it, the “magical mundane.” Imagine Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson-ish vibes, stories featuring questions of the body and its frailties, disgruntled bridesmaids, strange hitchhikers, creatures in the attic, postpartum fever dreams. Within the seeming confinement of domestic spaces lurks plenty of matter for fiction. I also love exploring the many tensions of the modern South. I’m drawn to elements of myth, folklore, and ghost story, and I’m always most interested in psychologically nuanced characters. My forthcoming debut novel, BRIGHT AND TENDER DARK, takes place in Chapel Hill, where, days after New Year's in the year 2000, a beautiful young college student is found in her student apartment brutally murdered. It’s the story of a death and its aftermath, the people who continued to be affected in the decades to come, and those who took the blame. This multi-perspective literary mystery about late-90's evangelicalism, internet conspiracy theories, true crime culture, and a Western NC cult is, ultimately, a tale of what we choose to believe.