When Trying to Return Home: Stories

Reading the West Book Awards Nominee
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond--and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.

Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro-Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life--even if we haven’t always been willing to listen.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, poet and university professor. She was awarded a fellowship in prose from the National Endowment for the Arts. She received her MFA from Florida International University and her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. Her cross-genre collection Scar On / Scar Off was released in 2017 on Stalking Horse Press. She teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.