This Monday’s author is Jennifer Maritza McCauley!

We always love to welcome back authors who have links to Columbia. Jennifer Maritza McCauley has a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri, and has participated in Unbound in the past as a moderator. Now we’re thrilled to welcome her back as an author!

Jennifer is a writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds an MFA from Florida International University and that PhD from Mizzou. The author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF and the short story collection When Trying to Return Home, she is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Jennifer’s new collection of stories, When Trying to Return Home, is a dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms. Profoundly moving and powerful, these stories dig deeply into the question of belonging. Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro–Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life—even if we haven’t always been willing to listen.

The book has received a TON of amazing pre-publicity attention, with starred reviews from both Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and wonderful praise from luminaries such as Deesha Philyaw and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.