Her Writing
Influenced by:
James Baldwin, Carolyn Forche, Susan Griffin, Linda Hogan and W.S. Merwin.
Mississippi Goddam
"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.
In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more. Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east. They all ran from it, they had to.
My Sisters Made of Light
Colorado Book Award-Literary Fiction, Finalist
My Sisters Made of Light follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland.
This novel pulls readers into the compelling, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala.
Ujala decides to follow the path for which her mother has prepared her and pushes aside fears for her own safety to help other women escape from the impossible situations in which they find themselves.
Dorothy Allison, author of the critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, says, "[Jacqueline St.
Joan] brings to her story what she brought to the law, a conviction that life is full of both struggle and purpose and that grace comes to us when we have no reason to expect it.
The Shawl of Midnight
SNEAK PREVIEW from The Shawl of Midnight.
All the women in Nafeesa's family have been imprisoned, assassinated, scarred or exiled. Yes, every single one. Is it any wonder, then, that the surviving men in her family have kept those disturbing facts from her? But now Nafeesa wants to know the truth. With the help of her beloved dying grandfather, Kulraj Singh, she receives clues to her past, and in return she pledges to bring his two daughters back to him before he dies. From Pakistan, Nafeesa travels, first to Mumbai--where she meets her lesbian activist Aunt Faisah and Faisah's partner Lia--and then to Kashmir. She's on a journey to adulthood--to learn who she is, who her people are and what she is made of. In the company of her heroic auntie, she travels the foothills of the Himalayas through a war zone, under a deadline, through snow lion country, only to question if this Baji Ulaja is truly so heroic after all. The Shawl of Midnight explores the depths of family relationships, how people change over time and distance, how we might discover through our own pressures and actions what we are made of, and where home truly is.
Aisha's Daughters
Finalist, F(r)iction Spring Short Story Contest, 2016
I passed the entrance to Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt horned goats. A tree sparrow and a whistling thrush sang on the holly oaks on the cliff. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat they were warning other birds. Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms wildly. Who is she? What is she doing? Why is she alone? Where is her husband?