INNOVATIVE FICTION
America Hart’s innovative fiction includes her debut novel about a girl who grows up to become a music composer.
into the silence: the fishing story
a novel
“This is the overlooked childhood of wonder and barely suppressed terror—the death of a wriggling fish against a rock, a father who won’t speak to his daughter after she cuts her long hair, the ferocious need to extend yourself out of yourself and into another, the haunting image of a woman singing a sad song alone in a meadow—overlooked because we’ve forgotten what America Hart knows so well: that the small, the incomplete, the ephemeral are all we have, despite the world’s bluster. She’s written a mesmerizing novel of womanhood and song as powerfully affecting in its own way as Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.” – SCOTT BLACKWOOD, Author of See How Small, winner of the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction.
“Hart is someone to watch.” Barbara Hoffert of Library Journal names into the silence one of 15 Key Titles Beyond the Best Sellers List for Autumn
into the silence: the fishing story (Red Hen Press 2014; Audiobook 2019) is available from bookstores, Red Hen Press, Amazon, eBay, and Audible.
SHORT STORIES
“Pictures at an Exhibition” – Galley Beggar Short Story Prize Finalist
“Indigo” – Bristol Short Story Prize, Notable Contender
“This Empty Room” – Fish Short Story Prize long list
NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES IN PROGRESS
SOMEWHERE IN THE RAIN – a collection of short stories
ACADIA – a novel blending poetry and prose. Acadia is an intergenerational tale about people living in a rural mining town. For the older generations, migrating to the town means new opportunities, but for the younger generation there are few prospects and they must move on once they are grown. As a photographer, the main character Damienne captures the history of the people and the place where she is from. Her photographs also record the stories of her travels, of her life-threatening illness, and of her inter-racial relationship with Shiloh and their three daughters.
THE BLOOD NOTEBOOK – a historical trilogy. Set on a plantation in the U.S. South, this work of innovative fiction re-constructs history as it tells the story of several generations of a mixed-race family, from the antebellum period to the early twentieth century, through the voices of multiple narrators. This trilogy is inspired by, and draws upon, my research in African and Trans-Atlantic Studies.