Exploring these stories necessitated—and, thankfully, welcomed—fiction. These fabrications are numerous and include the compression of time and the creation of composite characters. However, each character in the novel was a real person and the murder and the trial really did take place.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Julie Barer, for believing in me and my writing continuously and insisting on the best. With gratitude to my editor, Nancy Miller, for asking the right questions to push my thinking. Your suggestions are steadfastly gentle but transformative. Thank you. Thank you to The Book Group and Bloomsbury people who have done amazing things for my books—Gleni Bartels, Marie Coolman, Nicole Cunningham, Elizabeth Ellis, Nicole Jarvis, Laura Keefe, Liese Mayer, Laura Phillips, Patti Ratchford, Valentina Rice, and many others.
Thank you to Olaf Haje for the artwork. Thank you to my early readers and dear friends Anton DiSclafani and Shena McAuliffe.
With gratitude to my friends and colleagues at Miami University for the conversations—Cathy Wagner, Mike Hatch, Michele Navakas, cris cheek, Margaret Luongo, Daisy Hernández, Madelyn Detloff, Theresa Kulbaga, Kaara Peterson, Jody Bates, Brian Roley, Keith Tuma, Anita Mannur, and Erik Jensen, as well as the English Department for the semester-long and summer research support. Thank you to John Altman, Tim Melley, and the Altman Fellowship program for bringing together scholars from various disciplines for the year-long conversation about truth. Thank you to my students past and present—you challenge and inspire me with your stories, curiosities, insights, and compassion.
Thank you to my friends and mentors at the University of Denver, who encouraged this project when I was just beginning it as a doctoral student. With gratitude to Brian Kitely, Laird Hunt, Clark Davis, Joanna Ruocco, Adam Rovner, Nichol Weizenbeck, and Susan Schulten.
Thank you to the communities of people who love and support those whom I love and support, which enables me to escape into imaginary worlds for a while, while also being a mother.
Thank you to my parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents.
Thank you to my two youngest teachers, Inez and Arthur.
Thank you, Jerritt, for your discernment, love, humor, support, and belief.
Thank you, dear reader, for meeting me here.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
TaraShea Nesbit is the author of the novel The Wives of Los Alamos, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Library Journal “Best Debut,” the winner of two New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards, and published in four languages. She has been awarded a creative writing fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society for her second novel, as well as granted an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for her essays, which have been published in Granta, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, and Salon. She earned a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Denver, with a focus on prose, and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, with a focus on poetry. She is an assistant professor at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio, with her family.
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First published in the United States 2020
Copyright © TaraShea Nesbit, 2020
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-322-0; eBook: 978-1-63557-323-7
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