Janna Brooke Wallack, "Naked Girl" (2024)

After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children. Sienna and her little brother Siddhartha grow up in a Miami Beach mansion without schools, doctors, or attention. It’s the 1980s and their dad uses the mansion, with its dock on the water, as a base for his drug dealing and to house the seekers and lost souls who follow his lackadaisical cult, leaving Sienna and Siddhi to raise themselves. Their dotty grandmother and distant occasionally picks up some slack but won’t take responsibility for her son’s failings as a father. Sienna realizes that she and Siddhi have to raise themselves in this intriguing and unusual story about siblings helping each other survive a dysfunctional family.

Janna Brooke Wallack’s stories have been published by literary publications such as Hobart, Upstreet, Glimmer Train Press, American Literary Review, and more. Her short story "Campaigning" was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. Naked Girl’s prologue "Five Pictures" was a finalist for Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and her story "Cat and Rose" received a Pushcart nomination by The MacGuffin. Naked Girl was named a semifinalist for the 2024 Publishers Weekly Book Life Prize in Fiction. In addition to her writing career, Wallack has worked as a grant writer, a substance abuse prevention counselor, a wetlands manual editor, a theatre production assistant and an actress. After spending a couple of years in Hong Kong, she moved to Hoboken, NJ, raised five children and moved to Stone Ridge in the Catskills of New York, where she ran a permaculture gentleman’s farm. For more about Janna, visit https://jannabrookewallack.com/.

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