T KIRA MADDEN is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. Her work has appeared in PEN America, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. Her debut memoir, LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury on March 5th, 2019. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
About Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls:
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.
With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG is writer of fiction and nonfiction interested in queerness, gender, Appalachia, violence, crime, having a body, and being alive. Her fiction, essays, and reportage have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, The Paris Review online, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The New Republic, Salon, Slate, and others. Emma's work has been nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, named to Longreads' list of Best Crime Reporting 2017, and chosen as a notable story for the Best American Short Stories 2018. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Lambda Literary, the Carey Institute for the Global Good, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Her first book, THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL, is forthcoming from Hachette Books in 2020. Raised in New York City, Emma makes her home now in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.