Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University
and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s “The
Organist,” The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review,
The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. Her
short story “Heads of the Colored People…” won StoryQuarterly’s 2016 Fiction
Prize, judged by Mat Johnson. Her writing has received support from Callaloo,
Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently works as an
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois. Her first book,
Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award,
the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Aspen
Words Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
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Heads of the Colored PeopleStories
Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light. Stupid new technology. And preferring her head whole and her new auburn sew-in weave unsinged, and having no chloroform in the house, she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:
A final peace out
before I end it all.
Treat your life like bread,
no edge too small
to butter.
Jilly was not a poet or even an aspiring one. She just liked varying her posts as much as possible.
Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
Heads of the Colored People:Stories -
Heads of the Colored PeopleStories
The nuances of these and other things Emily, Fatima’s best friend since second grade, just couldn’t understand, no matter how earnestly she tried or how many questions she asked, like why they couldn’t share shampoo when she slept over, or “What does ‘For us, by us’ even mean,” and why Fatima’s top lip was darker than her bottom one.
The thing about the brown top lip and the pink lower one, Fatima had pieced together after what she learned from Violet and what she had learned at school, was that you could either read them as two souls trying to merge into a better self, or you could conceal them under makeup and talk with whichever lip was convenient for the occasion. At school and with Emily, she talked with her pink lip, and with Violet, she talked with her brown one, and that created tension only if she thought too much about it.
Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
Heads of the Colored People:Stories -
Heads of the Colored PeopleStories
When Alma first started at the hospital, some of the nurses taught her to pray for the children according to severity. A level one meant pray that the child would be well; level two meant pray for decreased pain. Alma was slow to understand level three—praying that the children would die, that mercy and grace would shorten their suffering—but she had come around to it a few months into her job, when the boy with the shattered face was wheeled in. His mother’s eyes convinced Alma that sometimes you suffered more the longer you lived.
Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
Heads of the Colored People:Stories
"Vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive, these stories by the vastly talented Thompson-Spires create a compelling surface tension made of equal parts skepticism towards human nature and intense fondness of it. Located on the big questions, they are full of heart." —George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo [on Heads of the Colored People]
“[Nafissa Thompson-Spires] has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we’ve never seen in American literature, blended it all together. . . giving us one of the finest short-story collections.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division [on Heads of the Colored People]
"With devastating insight and remarkable style, Nafissa Thompson-Spires explores what it means to come to terms with one’s body, one’s family, one’s future. The eleven vignettes in Heads of the Colored People elevate the unusual and expose the unseen, forming an original—and urgent—portrait of American life.” —Allegra Hyde, author of Of This New World
From the start of Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s first story, readers know they are in the hands of a bold new voice – young, gifted, black, unafraid of its own contradictions, and powerful enough to take the writer anywhere she wishes to go. Her wide-ranging and affecting collection explores and then pushes at the edges of realism. Surprising circumstance propels these stories forward, but the characters’ interiority imbues her prose with a profound compassion for their chaos and not-knowing. All of us are surrounded by darkness; our willingness to enter it is what makes us human.