"Moving the Saints: Passages from a Deconstructed Homeland" is named a notable essay in BAE 2024.

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, author photo.

“Moving the Saints,” from the Spring 2023 issue of Orion, was included as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2024. Read the piece here. Orion’s “The Language of Nature” issue includes work by Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, and others.

“Saussure talk about the signifier and the signified, but what happens when you can’t tell them apart? A mirror, like language, is a construct of duplicitous depth and direction, capable of true and lies in equal measure, and haven’t we always hoped to walk through glass and find a god we didn’t make, pull the moon from water and never drown?”
— Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, "Moving the Saints"

A tiny essay for your Monday.

my mother, rowing the laundry ashore (circa 1984)

Three years ago, I published a very brief, lyric piece of nonfiction in Waccamaw. It's called "Glass House: The First Moment of Her Leaving," and it's about my mother first meeting (or seeing) my father. You can read it here. With thanks to the lovely Cara Blue Adams.

A new, lyric essay forthcoming in StoryQuarterly.

My lyric essay, "Three Myths from the Northern Mariana Islands," is forthcoming from one of my favorite literary magazines, StoryQuarterly. The essay is divided into three parts, or three myths, from my native islands, the Marianas, also known as the Isles of Sails and the Isles of Thieves: "Creation Myth," "Myth of the Ancients," and "The Myth of the Lourdes Spring." I'm heart-happy and honored to be included in the issue, and I'll let you know when it drops.