Author and poet JES (John Elizabeth Stintzi) discusses they're new novel "My Volcano" (2022) with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and Memorial Library System.
About JES
John Elizabeth Stintzi (JES) is a non-binary & trans novelist, poet, visual artist, & teacher who was born and raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Watermill Center, and has been awarded the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the inagural Sator New Works award from Two Dollar Radio. JES was also awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize in 2019, their novel Vanishing Monuments was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and Junebat was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award from the League of Canadian Poets.
Their newest novel, My Volcano, is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio (USA) and Arsenal Pulp Press (CA/commonwealth) in March 2022.
JES’s work has been published throughout the United States and Canada since 2013, in places like Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. They are also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Plough Forward the Higgs Field (Rahila’s Ghost, fall 2019) and The Machete Tourist (knife | fork | book, spring 2018). They currently live with their wife—as well as a dog named Grendel—in Kansas City, MO, where they teach writing at the Kansas City Art Institute and are a studio resident at Charlotte Street.
About "My Volcano"
On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.
As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.
With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.