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Jennifer Galvão

Biography

Jennifer Galvão

Jennifer Galvão is a writer from New York State. She is a recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Fellowship in Fiction. Her work has been published in The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Hayden’s Ferry Review and The Masters Review. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

Jennifer Galvão

Books by Jennifer Galvão

Maria, Maria
by Jennifer Galvão - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

On a warm spring night in 1949, Benedito da Silva kills a man: a drunken stranger who has followed him home and attacked Bene’s new bride. When the dead man’s powerful family promises revenge, Bene is forced to flee Portugal and enlist with the famous White Fleet of codfishing ships. Maria Lucilia, nicknamed Cilia, is a young wife married to a man she might never see again. Now that Bene has fled, Cilia is tasked with keeping the struggling household afloat in his absence. Maria Alvares, a widow in her early 30s, runs a shop in the Newfoundland port town of St. John’s. Bene is a customer, and his easy affection catches her off guard. Lonely and isolated, she and Bene find refuge in each other. Unable to return home, unable to read or write, Bene asks his new mistress to write a love letter to the wife he left behind.