The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal story telling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life—and death—tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman’s womb is as real as the “previous tenant.” The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women—who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because “the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them.”

About the Author:

Shannon Robinson’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. Currently, she teaches creative writing and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University.

About the Moderator: 

Kate Keleher is a Junior Lecturer in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she earned her MFA in fiction and won The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021. Her short fiction won the Crazyhorse Short-Short Fiction Contest and was selected by the guest editor Aimee Bender for the anthology Best Small Fictions. Her short plays were staged at Berkeley Repertory Theatre as part of the PlayGround Writers Pool, where they won People’s Choice Awards in 2018 and 2019.