Renée Branum’s stories and essays have appeared in several publications, including The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Lit Hub. Her story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was included in Best American Nonrequired Reading’s 2019 anthology. She has earned MFAs in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Nonfiction from the University of Montana. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel, DEFENESTRATE.

She currently lives in Cincinnati where she is pursuing a PhD in Fiction Writing. When she isn’t writing, she can often be found sneaking chili dogs into screenings of old movies.

Books by Renée Branum

Defenestrate

by Renée Branum - Fiction

Marta and her twin brother, Nick, have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family collapses in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their “falling curse” began. There, Marta and Nick try to forge a new life for themselves. But their ties to the past and each other prove difficult to disentangle, and when they ultimately return to their midwestern home and Nick falls from a balcony himself, Marta is forced to confront the truths they've hidden from each other and themselves.