Additional information
by Grace Spulak (Author)
"With care and attention to its brilliantly complicated and kaleidoscopic characters, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think is a breathtaking collection that is rooted in place, people, and the full scope of who you are and who you get to be. Exploring queerness, gender, poverty, generational trauma, and the ways in which we are formed and form others, the stories in this collection have the scope of sagas and the intimacy of untold secrets." --K-Ming Chang, author of Exhausted Monsters
- "Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for April 2026," Autostraddle
- "Our Most Anticipated Books of 2026," Chicago Review of Books
- "Reads for the Rest of Us: The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026," Ms. Magazine
Set in rural New Mexico--a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation--this collection offers unexpected flashes of grace and hope.
Author Biography
Grace Spulak is a writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico. She is the author of Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Rising Writer Prize, selected by K-Ming Chang. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine's 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.
