Natalie Baszile is the author of Queen Sugar, which is being adapted for television by Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN. Natalie has a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers where she was a Holden Minority Scholar. An early version of Queen Sugar won the Hurston Wright College Writer’s Award, was a co-runner up in the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Novel-in-Progress competition, and excerpts were published in Cairn and ZYZZYVA. She has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation where she was awarded the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Rumpus.net, Mission at Tenth, and in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 9. She is a former fiction editor at The Cortland Review, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Natalie grew up in Southern California and lives in San Francisco with her family.
“The trick is to find the place where emotion sparks action, and action sparks emotion”: Sarah Van Arsdale chats with Natalie Baszile about setting, gender, and her new collection of novellas, In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.
