Where There Was Fire and The Sea Elephants, novels by John Manuel Arias and Shastri Akella, share more than their publisher (Flatiron Books) and the DNA of being debut novels released in 2023. Set in international geographies (Costa Rica and India respectively), both stories look at the restorative power of community and queer resistance in the face of oppressive power.

Join the authors as they celebrate the release of the paperbacks editions of their debut novels this fall. They will read from their debuts, engage in conversations, about work old and new, and about being queer writers of color navigating the American publishing industry.

John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer, and the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire, published in the US and the UK and a Good Morning America Buzz Pick and Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. A Canto Mundo fellow & an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, his prose and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.

Shastri Akella is a queer, neurodivergent migrant of color who comes from a working-class background. His writing is/will be in Best American Short Fiction 2024, Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, CRAFT, Masters Review, World Literature Review and elsewhere. His stories became finalists for the Narrative Fiction Prize twice and he won the 2024 BLR Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, a 2023 Pushcart Prize ,and a 2022 Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University. The Sea Elephants, his debut novel, published in the US (Flatiron
Books) and India (Penguin), was named a most-anticipated debut by Good Morning America, Electric Lit, Book Riot, and LGBTQ Reads, among others.