Milk Blood Heat. Dantiel W. Moniz

This is an electrifying debut that announces a major talent. Set in the author's home state (she is from Jacksonville, FL), each plot-driven and novelistic story follows characters who are grappling with a key moment in their lives— traumas past or present, losses of faith, love, or loved ones— and are searching for meaning in the self. Moniz is astonishing at depicting with nuance class, race, friendship, and familial inheritances and gifted in delivering sharp shocks within each story's plot. She is beloved and well-connected in the literary world and there has already been an outpouring of early praise for her and the book from Lauren Groff, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Danielle Evans, and T Kira Madden. We expect even more in the coming months, as we continue to get galleys to her friends and supporters including Joy Williams, Kristen Arnett, Teju Cole, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, to name just a few. Moniz has already won prizes for her stories. The titular Milk Blood Heat was awarded the 2018 Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction ( Ploughshares ), and «Outside the Raft» won the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award at the Key West Literary Seminar. She was the recipient of a Tin House Scholarship, and this year was selected as the writer in residence at Lighthouse Works (whose past alum include Anna Noyes). She was also one of ten finalists for the highly coveted Princeton Arts Fellowship. Milk Blood Heat will appeal to fans of A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, Florida by Lauren Groff, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Goodnight Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes, Antonya Nelson’s short story collections, especially Female Trouble ; as well as readers of fiction about sex, desire, and morality. Moniz’s work has been published in Apogee Journal , Ploughshares , Pleiades , Joyland , Tin House , McSweeney's Quarterly Concern , and most recently, The Yale Review , in April 2020.