CVK
Heidi Durrow’s story “Light-Skinned-ed Girl” beat out more than 800 other works for this year’s prestigious Lorian Hemingway Short Story award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Here’s her artist’s statement on the NYFA site:

“As a biracial, bicultural woman, I write to discover my place in the world and literature. What is the metaphor that explains me—to myself and others? I’m the blue-eyed, bilingual, daughter of a Danish immigrant and black G.I. I grew up poor but became educated and bourgeois. My writing—dealing with the intersection of race and class–claims grief as an essential part of multiracial/multicultural identity without simplifying my characters into the tragic mulatto stereotype. “