Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women

This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. Register here.

Charis celebrates Peach Pit a stunning anthology of fierce and dangerous women, featuring stories from sixteen award-winning and bestselling authors and edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley. The panel includes contributors Chantal V. Johnson, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Deesha Philyaw, and K-Ming Chang and is moderated by Alissa Nutting. 

A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother's life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of "Worst Girl in America." A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man. 

In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous--as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat. 

Chantal V. Johnson is a lawyer and writer. Her debut novel, Post-Traumatic, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A graduate of Stanford Law School and a former Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, she lives in New York.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, writer and PEN/American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction award finalist for her story collection White Dancing Elephants: Stories, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection and appeared on "best of" lists for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers and Sewanee Writers Workshop. She lives in Massachusetts.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Deesha lives in California.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice books Bestiary and Gods of Want (One World/Random House), and two forthcoming books, a novel titled Organ Meats (One World, October 2023) and a novella titled Cecilia (Coffee House Press). She lives in California.

Alissa Nutting is a creator, screenwriter, and showrunner, most recently of the Adult Swim & HBO MAX animated series Teenage Euthanasia, whose second season will air this July, as well as the HBO MAX original comedy Made For Love based on her New York Times Editor’s Choice novel of the same name.