Join Deep Vellum Books for a launch event with Rebecca Bernard for Our Sisters Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek) in conversation with fellow author Melissa Cundieff (Darling Nova, Autumn House Books). Deep Vellum poetry editor Sebastián Páramo will introduce.

About the book

A man recently released from prison returns to the dating scene and struggles to find the right time to reveal his long-past murder conviction.

A grieving mother considers her own role in her son’s death. A boy enables the destructive addiction of the person he’s in love with. A dog, witness to his owner’s violent acts, begins to sweat. Each story in Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die brings the reader face to face with the frailties of human character—and demonstrates how the yearning for love and connection allows beauty and resilience to emerge from darkness. In questioning traditional formulations of good and evil, Bernard’s stories ask us to recognize our own culpabilities and acknowledge our shared humanity. None of us is the worst thing we’ve ever done, these stories compel us to believe. Hope is always worth letting in.

About the presenters

Rebecca Bernard is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Angelo State University. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Juked, Pleiades, and elsewhere and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories.

Melissa Cundieff received an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in places such as Best of the Net, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Four Way Review, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, and Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art. She has published a chapbook, Futures With Your Ghost. Originally from Texas, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.