If I Had the Wings: Short Stories (Paperback)

Description

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Growing up gay in the small Greek-Bahamian community, which feels its traditional culture and religious pieties are under threat, is fraught with constraints and even danger. The main characters in Helen Klonaris’s poetic, inventive and sometimes transgressive collection of short stories confront this reality as part of their lives. Yet there are also ways in which young women in several of the stories search for roots in that tradition – to find within it, alternatives to the dominant influence of the Orthodox church.

About the Author

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Helen Klonaris is a Greek-Bahamian writer and teacher who lives between the Bay Area, California and Nassau, Bahamas. Her early years in the Bahamas were spent working as a human rights activist, raising awareness around issues that ranged from capital punishment to violence against women to discrimination against LGBT Bahamians. She co-founded several socially significant organizations, including The Rainbow Alliance of the Bahamas, and several literary journals, associations, and organizations including WomanSpeak: A Journal for Caribbean Women's Literature and Art, The Bahamas Association for Cultural Studies, (BACUS) and the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute (BWSI).

Praise For…

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"Klonaris uses memory and dialogue as valuable tools to convey her stories, introducing a compelling voice to short fiction." —Jeff Fleisher, Foreword Reviews