Nancy Rawles

NRawles.jpg

Nancy Rawles is the author of three critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels - My Jim (Crown Publishing 2005); Crawfish Dreams (Doubleday, 2003), and Love Like Gumbo (Fjord Press, 1997). All three novels address issues of sexuality, violence, and racial oppression in the lives of their female protagonists. Love Like Gumbo won an American Book Award for its portrayal of a lesbian daughter's struggle for independence from her warm but suffocating family. Crawfish Dreams, the story of an elder's coming to terms with the devastation of her community and the depression of her offspring, was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Nancy's latest novel, My Jim, tells the story of the wife and children of Mark Twain's famous slave character from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In her New York Times review, Helen Schulman called My Jim "as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature."