And not just do better, but write something that I really mean.” “Luster,” Leilani said, “was an experiment in speaking honestly and in committing to a distinct point of view.” So when she got to grad school, she discarded them and thought, “I can do better. “It was important to me,” Leilani said, “to have a book where characters have work, where characters have something they do and care about.” And she was adamant that work play a big role in the lives of the characters in “Luster.”

The job at the Department of Defense inspired the short story “ Hard Water.” In 2016, she found herself having trouble breathing for half a year and turned the experience into the story “ Breathing Exercise,” published in the Yale Review. Those years are present in much of her work. Leilani started writing under her first and middle name - her surname is Baptiste - as a way to separate her literary work from her employment. “I’d write inside the HTML of the e-books, so it looked like I was making corrections,” she said, “but I was writing ‘Luster.’” At other jobs, she wrote on the backs of receipts or in email drafts. at New York University in 2017, she joined Macmillan as a production associate. When she moved from Washington to New York to pursue her M.F.A.

She went on to work at a scientific journal, on a top-secret project for the Department of Defense and as a Postmates delivery person. “There was a frenzy to that grind.”Īfter graduating college in 2012, Leilani took the first job she could find, as an imaging specialist at. “The going was slow and the going was private,” Leilani said. That kind of solitude is not what she is used to, having grown up first in the Bronx, then a suburb of Albany, N.Y., in a family of West Indian artists who encouraged her creativity.įor years, she juggled jobs and art, doing her writing at night or during work shifts. Every single number was a person, and one of those was my dad.”īecause of their complicated relationship, her parents’ separation when Leilani was in college and the forced isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, she has had to process the loss alone. “There’s an aspect of this moment - because of the enormity of it, you see the number of people who have died - it feels abstract,” she said in an interview. That is when she plans to take some time to grieve the loss of her father, Warren, who died from Covid-19 in April.

Raven Leilani has one of this summer’s most anticipated fiction debuts, but in some ways, she is already anticipating the day the buzz dies down.

Raven leilani books