Cristina Henríquez
Fiction Reading:  Tuesday, November 3
7 p.m. Bucknell Hall

Cristina Henríquez was recently featured in Virginia Quarterly Review as one of "Fiction's New Luminaries." She is the author of the novel The World In Half and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, both from Riverhead Books (Penguin). Her stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Preservation, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI, and in the anthologies This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant. Cristina is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. She earned her undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Chicago.

From The World in Half by Cristina Henríquez:
Courtesy of Riverhead Books

     We’re across the street from my father’s house.  I’m staring at it right now.  Maybe he isn’t home, or maybe he doesn’t even live there anymore, but it almost doesn’t matter.  At one time at least this was his house, the place where my father cooked his meals and slept and got dressed in the morning and dreamed of me at night.  The structure is covered in a faded salmon-colored paint.  There is a heap of rusted auto parts in the front yard.  A disused woven hammock lays like a dried corn husk on the ground between two trees. 
     Come on, Mira, I tell myself.  This is why you came here.  Get out of the car.  Go to him.  Come on.  In one fluid motion, I open the car door and hurry across the street, practically skipping over the pavement as if it’s hot and volatile lava.  The neighbors are watching me from their stoops.  From behind the front door, a clanging noise erupts and then settles, as though someone dropped a pot on the floor.  My father.  My father is in there.  I knock.