Stephanie Powell Watts won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize. Ms. Powell Watts’s stories explore the lives of African Americans in fast food and factory jobs, working door to door as Jehovah’s Witness ministers, and pressing against the boundaries of the small town, post-integration South. Her forthcoming debut novel, titled No One Is Coming to Save Us, follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted but never had. As Ms. Powell Watts describes it, “Imagine The Great Gatsby set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.” Born in the foothills of North Carolina, with a PhD from the University of Missouri and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she now lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.
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We Are Taking Only What We NeedStoriesFrom"We Are Taking Only What We Need "
Daddy shook the box, kicked it, mumbled under his breath something that sounded like it had teeth. He came from around the house with a shovel and dragged it behind him, along with the box, to the woods. He would bury my dog, I thought.
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We Are Taking Only What We NeedStoriesFrom"All the Sad Etc."
The sharp vision of Douglas’ face screwed into concentration on one then the other bouncing Ping-Pong ball, his arm swinging at what he must have believed was lightning speed, his face a mask of indecipherable, heavily medicated emotion. How hilarious that would be to somebody who didn’t give a damn about him.
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We Are Taking Only What We NeedStoriesFrom"Highway 18"
Just beyond the parking lot Highway 18 looked like a runway, a straight shot, launching me anywhere, or so I thought, until my eyes settled on the across-the-street hamburger joint and throngs of my classmates in bunches spilling out of cars like adolescent clowns, making me forget that I was in the middle of my life, in the eye of it, and forcing me to see myself from the outside. I didn’t like the view. Besides, I was a Jehovah’s Witness.
We Are Taking Only What We Need:Stories
“In a strong debut, Watts chronicles in 11 stories the lives of black North Carolinians . . . In Watts’s South, people are trapped, by relationships, jobs, and flaws in their character, which can lead to a trap of a different sort: incarceration. And not everyone (nor everything) makes it out alive. As the bereft narrator of the title story declares, the kind of love found in the Carolina hills—and in these stories—‘demands tribute.’” —Publishers Weekly [on We Are Only Taking What We Need]
"Watts writes with a penetrating eye for the extraordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people. As I read, I found myself holding my breath." —Alyce Miller [on We Are Only Taking What We Need]
Selected Works
“The full range of the human condition resides in these eleven stories set in North Carolina. Ms. Powell Watts manages to shift camera angles in relationships between characters — whether familial, platonic, or romantic — offering a fuller picture of the emotional stakes, and her characters are understood without judgment in a way that reminds one of William Trevor. It’s an accomplished tour de force, authentic, sure-footed, crackling with life and passion. A real pleasure — she is a writer to watch.”