Contributors

Sejal Shah
Contributor History
Biography
Sejal Shah
Photograph © Preston Merchant
Sejal Shah is the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. Her first book of essays is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press through its literary nonfiction series, Crux. Her fiction manuscript, How to Make Your Mother Cry, was a finalist for the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize from Pleiades Press. Her nonfiction manuscript, Things People Say, was a finalist for the 2017 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection Prize and the Kore Press Memoir-in-Essays Prize. She lives in Rochester, New York.

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In Print

Vol. 82
Conjunctions:82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

You Rockerchair
by Robert Antoni
May 8, 2024
Why my mother don’t like me?
     I ask Ansin, my grandmother. I say, How it is my mother never did like me?
     She steups. Kiss she teeth. And smooth-out that news she was reading in. Raise it up again to give it a little flip. At the top. And you could feel the vexness in that flip too.
     I say, Is cause I ent got no father?
Gentleness
by JoAnna Novak
May 1, 2024
“You have fifteen minutes,” the cashier says. Repeats it, runs your card, matter-of-factly smiling like Iowa girls do. Brenda smiled that smile too—pleasant, courteous. No faking, no strain.
     “Any questions?” she asks.
     You poke a carousel rack of baseball caps in front of her register. It creaks a clockwise inch. Stiff-billed, nylon, mesh. Lots of American flags. This one with the cabin patch, stitched with “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a deep bluish plum, a color Brenda likes.
 
Confessions of a Thief
by Jeffery Renard Allen
April 24, 2024
The July morning was alive with a sound in the air, strange communications, the acoustics of the big yard amplifying each rustle, each wave. Odd creatures glittering on the ground. Herds spread lavishly, a wilderness of transparent wings, bug eyes, a mosaic of glassy fragments. Glinting. They covered the grass, the sidewalk, covered the branches of the trees.