Philip Guston as First Responder
Catastrophe is obscured By a white hood, but He points a thick finger At the hatred Points it out Puts it down In paint, in pictures Everyone hates, but Philip Guston doesn’t care. He just lights a cigarette With another cigarette His hand held Like a pretend gun It’s ugly, it’s rude, and There’s blood and shit everywhere. Just like the truth.
Suzanne Feldman graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1981 and received a Masters in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. Her three science fiction novels are, Speaking Dreams (1992), Hand of Prophecy (1998), and The Annunciate (1999). She received a Nebula Award in 2001 for her short fiction and the Editors Prize for fiction in 2005 at The Missouri Review. She has had stories published in Narrative Magazine, including “The Lapedo Child” which was selected as one of the year’s best (2013). Her short story collection, The Cure for Everything was awarded the International Rubery Prize for fiction, 2014. Her novel Absalom’s Daughters (Holt, 2016) received a starred review in Kirkus. Her short story “The Witch Bottle” (Gargoyle Magazine, 2016) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2019. Her latest novel, Sisters of the Great War, (Mira/HarperCollins, 2021) has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2022 she was awarded her third grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and won The Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize for her short story collection, The Witch Bottle (2022).