Join us for a conversation with Writer-in-Residence Juliana Lamy about her debut book, “You Were Watching from the Sand,” a stylistically and conceptually daring collection that winds from fantastical horror to mischievous domestic realism and always keeps in its sharp, compassionate view the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, “You Were Watching from the Sand” is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

Book signing to follow.

Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She received her Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. While there, she was also the recipient of the university’s Le Baron Russell Brigg’s Prize for Undergraduate Fiction, as well as the Gordon Parks Essay Prize for Nonfiction. She is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of Red Hen Press’s 2021 Ann Petry Award for Fiction, winner of the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shield’s Prize as well as the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. In 2023, she received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.