Body and Bread

"In Body and Bread, Nan Cuba goes straight to the heart of love and death and families and religion and the land."--Grace Dane Mazur, author of Silk: Stories and Trespass: a novel

Years after her brother Sam's suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him in it. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family's tenant farm and a young woman's life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family's history in east Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist--images of sacrifice, ritual, and death--haunt her waking dreams. In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.

Winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award in Fiction.

Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award.

Nan Cuba is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and is writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in publications such as Life and D Magazine. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in Quarterly West, Antioch Review, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, and the Harvard Review, among others. She is co-editor of Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers & Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008).

Nan Cuba received her MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center (geminiink.org). She is the spring 2016 Dobie Paisano Fellow and received a Fundación Valparaiso Residency Grant in Mojácar, Spain. She is currently writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University, where she teaches in the MA/MFA Program in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in publications such as LIFE and D Magazine. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in Antioch Review, Columbia, Harvard Review, Printer's Row, and StorySouth, among others. She is co-editor of Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers & Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008).