Chavisa Woods

Biography

Chavisa Woods was born and raised in Sandoval, Illinois. She is a literary fiction author and poet. Woods is the author of three works of full-length fiction and the recipient of the Cobalt Fiction Prize, The Jerome Foundation Award for Emerging Authors, and was a two-time Lambda Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Tin House, Electric Lit, The Brooklyn Rail, The Evergreen Review, and many other. She has featured as a reader at multiple venues in across the country, including the Whitney Museum as part of Butch Morris' Chorus of Poets, the New York Vision Festival, Quimby's Bookstore Chicago, City Lights Bookstore, Town Hall Seattle, Hot Festival at the Dixon Place Theater NYC, The Howl festival NYC, The Brecht Forum, Pink Pony Reading Series, Blue Stockings Bookstore NYC, The Fresh Fruit Festival, Slam Poetry in St. Louis and the National Poetry Slam.

Her first work of full-length fiction "Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind," was released in 2009 by Fly By Night Press. The second edition was released in 2012 by Autonomedia Press under Unbearables imprint. This book is both a short fiction collection and a novel. The ‘chapters’ are interconnected short stories written in varying styles that follow two characters, a mother and daughter, throughout their childhoods into adulthood. The identities of the characters are sometimes abstracted within the contexts of the stories. The book explores the rural American landscape and the experiences of working class women in the U.S., addressing issues of lesbian identity, race relations, and cycles of abuse both domestic and societal. The book also explores psychological and metaphysical themes, combining realism with meta-fiction, creating what some have called ‘magical realism.’

During 2008 she collaborated with a contemporary video artist and animator to produce abstract animations to accompany the stories from Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind.

Woods' second work of fiction, The Albino Album, a novel, was released by Seven Stories Press in 2013. The Albino Album, a queer epic, follows the life of a little girl who accidentally feeds her mother to an albino tiger and grows up to become a domestic terrorist. Woods presents a technicolored vision of rural adolescence, the story of a girl with an unpronounceable name—a fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots who travels along all the bizarre yet familiar byways of human desire from the cornfields of Indiana to the big brass sound of Mardi Gras, to the heights of the Empire State Building. In the tradition of the southern gothic novel, Woods presents a new land of contemporary misfits including fire-dancers, pseudo Nazis who breed albino animals, catholic workers, horse thieves, and the archangel Gabriel. A bold exploration of the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, The Albino Album is an exhilarating contemplation on the relationships between political action, art, and romance. This book was a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award.

Woods' third work of fiction, Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country, 224 pages, Seven Stories Press, published in May, 2017, is a collection of short fiction focusing on the lives of people living in rural areas of the U.S.

Awards

Woods was awarded the Cobalt Fiction Prize in 2013 for her short work of poetic prose entitled "Things to do when you're Goth in the Country."

Chavisa Woods was the 2008 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant for Literature to allow her to travel to southern Illinois as well as Kansas City, Missouri for "exploring . . . her Native American heritage," "conducting interviews with estranged relatives and citizens of her hometown" in an effort to"understand relationships between the American rural class and Native American culture," according to the grant.

Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind was a finalist for the 21st Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction.

Poetry

Woods has published poetry in a number of magazines, including:

Fiction

Nonfiction

Documentaries

Book Reviews