Fiction Reading by Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts is the much-acclaimed author of No One is Coming to Save Us.  She is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a Pushcart Prize, and the Southern Women's Award for Emerging Writer of  the Year.  She was named a PEN/Hemingway finalist for her short story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need.  Her novel, No one is Coming to Save Us, is “A skillful riff on The Great Gatsby… Watts writes about ordinary people leading ordinary lives with an extraordinary level of empathy and attention….The ways in which No One Is Coming to Save Us intersects with and veers away from Fitzgerald’s familiar plot can be very rewarding… Every departure can be seen as a sly comment on what it means to be a person of color in today’s America…. The novel’s intricately plotted relationships pay off satisfyingly in its final chapters.” —New York Times Book Review