Fearcatcher: A Posthumous Celebration of Naira Kuzmich

Tombolo Books is honored to present Naira Kuzmich's Fearcatcher. Kuzmich's life and work will be celebrated by poets Anne Barngrover and Vedran Husić and her former editor at UNO press, Chelsey Shannon.

Fearcatcher, Kuzmich's posthumous debut novel, is lush and mythic yet profoundly intimate. It is a a journey through perpetual questions of fear and of fate.

More about Fearcatcher

In a small village in Soviet Armenia, a baby girl is found abandoned in the woods, with one hand forced out of her swaddle. All her life Ruzan Garsevanian will wonder what she was reaching for the night the fearcatcher’s husband found her and took her home to his mysterious wife. The fearcatcher is a woman at once at the center of her community and at the very outskirts of it. To men, she is a threat to their traditional Armenian way of living; to women, she is the answer to all of their fears. For the daughter she has adopted, she is the woman Ruzan can never truly know.

Trained by Ripsimeh in the ways of fearcatching, as she grows, Ruzan yearns for freedom: from the hypocrisy and insularity of her village, and from the hand of destiny her mother swears will eventually take Ruzan in its grasp—for when a fearcatcher dies, a fearcatcher is born. In the capital city of Yerevan, where revolution brews, Ruzan is determined to carve out a life on her own terms. But when disaster threatens the lives of both the family she has left behind and the family she has newly begun, Ruzan must decide whether she will become unknowable to her own daughter, too.

Naira Kuzmich was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in West Branch, Blackbird, Ecotone, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the short story collection In Everything I See Your Hand. She passed away in 2017 from lung cancer.

Anne Barngrover is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Everwhen, which was published with University of Akron Press in 2023 and named the bronze medal winner for the 2023 Florida Book Awards. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in places such as Verse Daily, Arts & Letters, Guernica, Ecotone, and The Slowdown podcast. Anne is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she directs the MA in Creative Writing program.

Vedran Husić was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and raised in Germany and the United States. His collection of stories, Basements and Other Museums, won the St. Lawrence Book Award and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. He has work published in The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, Image, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, AGNI, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a National Endowment for the Arts.

Chelsey K. Shannon is a writer and an editor at the University of New Orleans Press. She holds an M.F.A. from the UNO Creative Writing Workshop. As a teenager, she published the memoir Chelsey: My True Story of M**der, Loss, and Starting Over. Other publications can be found here. Scorpio moon, Cancer rising, Aquarius sun, Chelsey is committed to interrogating and creating from her position as a biracial Black queer femme. She’s prone to obsession and lives in New Orleans with her family.

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