CHAVISA WOODS is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist, and recipient of the 2009 Jerome Foundation Award for emerging writers. Her debut collection of short stories, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Debut Fiction. Woods has read or performed at The Whitney Museum, Penn State, the New York Vision Festival, the NYC HOWL festival, and the New York Hot Festival. She has been published in the New York Quarterly,The Evergreen Review, Union Station, The Brooklyn Rail, and others.
Everything is written beautifully, and there's nothing hiding the cruelty. It makes for an uncomfortable read. <br>--Ariel Speedwagon, Velvet Park<br><br> Devoid of pretense or fear, Woods tells a not so normal coming-of-age story set in the stretched-out underbelly of rural America. Smart but unworldly, Woods creates a new world for the contemporary misfit where circus performers, Catholic workers, fire jugglers, and power wives sit at the same table. A gooble gobble successor, Woods's edgy sensuality doesn't second-guess. Her language is clear, her home somewhere and nowhere. <br>--2013 Library Journal Spring Pick<br><br> A natural and philosophical writer, Woods is propelled by her commitments to language and desire to illuminate ghettos of consciousness: geographic, economic, and emotional. <br>--Sarah Schulman, author of Rat Bohemia and Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination