Mattaponi Queen

My first book of short stories, Mattaponi Queen, was published by Graywolf Press. Mattaponi Queen was selected by Percival Everett for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Publication Prize for Fiction. You can read more about the contest here and here.

Below are some of the nice things people have said about MQ.

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“Strongly imagined, finely controlled and well-crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that only good fiction can be.”—Percival Everett, Bakeless Fiction Judge

“Belle Boggs infuses these stories of sometimes hardscrabble, dreams-deferred lives with a finely crafted, absolutely confident elegance. Boggs is a writer who knows how deep and how hard we can love and live. Her characters are too real to ever forget.”—Marita Golden, author of After

 

“Belle Boggs is an immensely gifted writer, and this is a remarkable debut collection-each nuance of emotion, of insight, of dialogue and character, is pitch-perfect and surprisingly resonant.”—Mary Yukari Waters, author of The Favorites

 

“The Mattaponi River is the confluence of three rivers and is also the stunning metaphor for a place where three races have lived inextricable histories for generations. Indeed, the stories in Mattaponi Queen gather like converging waters until the narrative world is coursing and undeniable. A few lives leak away from the Mattaponi, others never leave its banks, but character and place are one in this world so unapologetically evoked by Belle Boggs’ beautiful, direct prose, and tension is not so much a few events as it is a constancy that is occasionally emerged from, the water moccasin head above the water . . . and then not . . .”—Michelle Latiolais, author of Even Now and A Proper Knowledge

 

“Mattaponi Queen was one of the best things I’ve read all year. I looked forward each night to a new story, and by the end, felt as if I’d been sitting in a car or on a porch with a cousin or neighbor, listening to how things went wrong, or how they could have gone right, or how they might still look up. The setting was so perfectly rendered that I saw the river, the dirt roads, the woods, and most of all, the way each character moved in that landscape. The interwoven stories remind me of Annie Proulx crossed with Ernest Gaines—the dry humor, the understatement, and the wonderful dialogue that sounds as if I’m hearing it while sitting on a folding chair in a yard.”—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales