Skip to main content

Venita Blackburn

Biography

Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn is the author of the novel DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA and the story collection BLACK JESUS AND OTHER SUPERHEROES, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, American Short Fiction and Bellevue Literary Review. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color.

Venita Blackburn

Books by Venita Blackburn

Dead in Long Beach, California
by Venita Blackburn - Fiction

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body 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 reckless determination, she doubles --- and triples --- down on posing as her brother. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas and secrets dangerously into the present.