Venita Blackburn

“Chaotic, sexy, and binge-worthy as hell, Be Gay, Do Crime is an EVENT.”—Ruth Madievsky, author of All Night PharmacyA follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca EkwuyasiA trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers’ homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail. In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime–unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.

Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024. One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. "Told by machines from the future, Blackburn's idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come." --The New York Times Book Review "You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do." --Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reck-less determination, she doubles--and triples--down on posing as her brother, risking not only her sanity but also her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadija. As Coral's swirl of lies closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes entangled with her own reality, in the pro-cess pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present. A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024. One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. "Told by machines from the future, Blackburn's idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come." --The New York Times Book Review "You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do." --Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reck-less determination, she doubles--and triples--down on posing as her brother, risking not only her sanity but also her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadija. As Coral's swirl of lies closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes entangled with her own reality, in the pro-cess pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present. A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

A Paris Review Staff Pick and an Amazon Editors' Pick. Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize." Bold, witty, ominous and vulnerable . . . How to Wrestle a Girl shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge our presumptions and dissect the beauty, danger and wonder of girlhood." --The New York Times Book Review Hilarious, tough, and tender stories from a farseeing star on the rise Venita Blackburn's characters bully and suffer, spit and tease, mope and blame. They're hyperaware of their bodies and fiercely observant, fending off the failures and advances of adults with indifferent ease. In "Biology Class," they torment a teacher to the point of near insanity, while in "Bear Bear Harvest(TM)," they prepare to sell their excess fat and skin for food processing. Stark and sharp, hilarious and ominous, these pieces are scabbed, bruised, and prone to scarring. Many of the stories, set in Southern California, follow a teenage girl in the aftermath of her beloved father's death and capture her sister's and mother's encounters with men of all ages, as well as the girl's budding attraction to her best friend, Esperanza. In and out of school, participating in wrestling and softball, attending church with her hysterically complicated family, and dominating boys in arm wrestling, she grapples with her burgeoning queerness and her emerging body, becoming wary of clarity rather than hoping for it. A rising star, Blackburn is a trailblazing stylist, and in How to Wrestle a Girl she masterfully shakes loose a vision of girlhood that is raw, vulnerable, and never at ease.

2018 PEN America Literary Award Winner–Los Angeles Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways. Venita Blackburn's characters hurl themselves toward the inevitable fates they might rather wish away. Their stories play with magic without the sparkle, glaring at the internal machinations of the human spirit. Fragile symbols for things such as race, sexuality, and love are lifted, decorated, and exposed to scrutiny and awe like so many ruins of our imagination. Through it all Blackburn’s characters stumble along currents of language both thoughtful and hilarious.