Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods, published by FSG in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program. She attended the Community of Writers in 2015.