Anne Valente’s debut short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, released from Dzanc Books in September 2014. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook An Elegy for Mathematics (Origami Zoo Press, 2013). Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in One Story, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize. She was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and her work was selected as a notable story in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011. Her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in the Midwest.
“William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ stands as an answer for what it means to write from the Midwest. Told in thirty-six discrete sections, this story is a devastatingly gorgeous meditation on loss and the rhythms of the Midwestern landscape.
