Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings

Taboos and Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, is an anthology that includes fiction and nonfiction. It was edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, and Devi S. Laskar, and focuses on breaking the rules with stories by Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kim Addonizio alongside exceptional work by both noted and emerging writers. The anthology offers a scope of voices, styles, stories, and wrongdoings. From infidelity to family prejudices, from breaking the law to broken promises, from losing everything to finding empowerment, characters in these pieces offer a look at stepping over the line in all too human ways. Edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, and Devi S. Laskar, the anthology represents the best of both solicited and unsolicited work. Unsolicited material has been read by judge Maurice Carlos Ruffin and prizes awarded to one winning story and two runners up. Contributors: Kim Addonizio - Paco Aramburu - Lisa Lynn Biggar - Bonnie Jo Campbell - Yohanca Delgado - Walter Evans - Michael Gaspeny - Molly Giles - Pam Houston - Kyle Ingrid Johnson - Soniah Kamal - Sabina Khan-Ibarra - Jen Knox - Dalton Monk - Hadley Moore - Joyce Carol Oates - Pamela Painter - Francine Rodriguez - J.C. Sasser - C.J. Spataro Sarah Stone - Melanie Rae Thon - Chavisa Woods - Lee Zacharias

About the Author :
Luanne Smith is a native Kentuckian who now lives between New Jersey and Florida. She is recently retired after 30 years of teaching creative writing and film at West Chester University near Philadelphia. Her fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Texas Review, Oxford Magazine and other literary journals and anthologies. She has published poetry and nonfiction as well. Luanne has hosted well-received AWP Conference panels focused on women writers and the challenges women face writing gritty material and badass female characters. She last presented a panel on the double-standard women writers encounter compared to men when writing sexual content. Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook's Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; and among other awards, selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book "All Georgians Should Read." The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019. Laskar's second novel, CIRCA, will be published in Spring 2022 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family. Kerry Neville is the author of two collections of stories, Necessary Lies, which received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Fiction and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year, and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, Triquarterly, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. In 2018, she was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was Visiting Faculty in the MA in Creative Writing Program and continues as faculty in the Frank McCourt/University of Limerick Summer Writing School. She is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the MFA and Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Georgia College and State University.