PGH Launch! Patricia Grace King, "Those Who Vanish" (w/ Sherrie Flick)

White Whale is honored to host this year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, Patricia Grace King, to launch "Those Who Vanish"!
About this Event

White Whale is honored to host this year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, Patricia Grace King, for the Pittsburgh launch of her collection, Those Who Vanish! Deftly intertwining elements of the interpersonal with larger societal and political narratives, Those Who Vanish is an astonishing, unrelenting debut. Traveling all the way from northern England, King will be joined by local Pittsburgh icon and dear friend of White Whale, Sherrie Flick.

"The stories in Patricia Grace King’s ravishing Those Who Vanish chronicle the consequences of inhabiting spaces both physical and psychic where one doesn’t naturally belong. In stories ranging from conflict-ravaged Guatemala to the American Midwest and beyond, King’s unrelenting exploration of our need to survive while retaining our humanity propels these narratives into surprising and heart-breaking terrain. As one character poignantly asks of another, ‘The real question is, do you want to be found?’ Those Who Vanish doesn’t present us with easy answers but masterfully interrogates what it means to be lost and the often-blinding nature of self-discovery." Quan Barry, author of The Unveiling and judge of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

To disappear meant to die. In those days, in that place, almost everyone knew. With sentences that cut clean to the bone and wrench the heart, Patricia Grace King invites us to comprehend the traumas of wartime and the legacies they create. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords, we find ourselves still urgently needing to understand the wars the United States has fomented abroad.

Offering readers a direct window into the Guatemalan internal armed conflict (1960–1996), the stories in Those Who Vanish wrestle with the question of individual responsibility in the face of global forces, portraying with sensitivity American citizens in Guatemala during the conflict and the later experience of Guatemalan expats in America. We see how trauma ripples: through generations of a family, across oceans and borders, and even into the very fabric of our relationships.

Upon finding human teeth on their doorstep, two peace workers bury them out of respect for the dead. A tomboyish blonde American who grew up poor in rural Maryland must confront fraught issues of class when she begins dating a wealthy Guatemalan man. At a Mennonite sleepaway camp in Kentucky, two missionary kids connect over their shared experiences in Central America—until they don’t, hormones and hard memories bubbling between them. Never once does King shy away from difficult terrain, instead rendering the most awkward and awful of moments with clarity and precision, interrogating choices at every turn. And what were we doing? Why had we come? These are questions worth pondering.

Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Those Who Vanish is a collection we can’t afford not to read. Through stories that explore faith, violence, survival, and the resilience of the human heart, King insists we think critically about foreign wars and the roles we might play in them. Likewise, she asks us to consider the personal wars we wage against each other, and our own selves, as we decide who we are and what we’re willing to fight for.

SHERRIE FLICK is an award-winning author of six books, including three story collections: I Have Not Considered Consequences, Thank Your Lucky Stars, and Whiskey, Etc., all published by Autumn House Press. Her 2024 debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist was published by University of Nebraska Press. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in Pittsburgh.

PATRICIA GRACE KING grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom, where she resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the Florida Review’s Leiby Prize. Other stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, and Nimrod. A former Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she has received additional support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the British Library. Those Who Vanish is her first book.