June Park

We couldn’t more excited to reveal the show-stopping, June Park-designed cover for Venita Blackburn’s forthcoming collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl. You might know Blackburn from her first 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. If you don’t, she is one of the most original, hilarious, and soul-shaking fiction writers working today. And in How to Wrestle a Girl, she masterfully shakes loose a vision of girlhood that is raw, vulnerable, and never at ease. These are unforgettable stories that explore womanhood, Blackness, queerness, and the pain of growing up, told with an inimitable, mesmerizing voice.

How to Wrestle a Girl arrives on September 7, 2021, but you can pre-order and learn more now! You can follow Blackburn on Twitter here, and if you really can’t wait, you can read a few of the stories in The Paris Review, Apogee Journal, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.