Andria Nacia Cole

About "Men Be Either Or, But Never Enough"

Eight-year-old Leeza hates the boys on twenty-fifth street. Worse than anything, she thinks, after they spit on her and tell her she smells. At home, Leeza's stepmother shows her no sympathy, scrubbing her skin raw and ordering her to chew gum. When the teasing from the "beady-eyed" twins on twenty-fifth takes a dangerous turn, so does the tension between Leeza, her stepmother, and her father. Moving fluidly between unreliable perspectives, "Men Be Either Or, But Never Enough" is a fresh and enthralling account of a young girl's struggle to make sense of her family and herself.

Andria Nacina Cole was raised in Buffalo, New York. She attended Morgan State and Johns Hopkins universities, where she earned degrees in creative writing and fiction, respectively. Her stories have appeared in The Feminist Wire, Fiction Circus, and Baltimore Urbanite, among others. She has received multiple grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, including the organization’s top prize for fiction in 2006. She is the 2010 recipient of Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, for the short story “Leaving Women.” Currently, she is seeking publication for a collection of stories titled Ain’t But So Much Joy, Ain’t Likely to Last. She resides in Baltimore, Maryland.