Winner of the 2018 CHAUTAUQUA JANUS PRIZE, celebrating an emerging writer’ s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers’ imaginations.
Growing up in poverty in the American south, Maya yearns to escape and find something better than anything she’ s known. “ She is so hungry. It is not food, but everything else, the world … What she needs is not on her street with the one-eyed houses. It is not in the patch of trees she once thought was a forest. It is beyond, somewhere she can’ t quite imagine.” Brought to vivid and visceral life through Nicole Cuffy’ s aching, lyrical prose, Maya’ s childhood fascination with anatomy and her adult pursuit of a career in medicine leads her to discover what it means to lose-and what it means to break free.
At times raw and at others melodic and tender, Atlas of the Body is a deeply resonant meditation on hunger and the costs of realizing a dream.