Vajra Chandrasekera, is a writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors won the Locus, Nebula, and Crawford awards, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. His short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in Analog, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times, among others. He has worked as an editor for Strange Horizons and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, and as a judge for the Dream Foundry Writing Contest and the Salam Award. He is online at vajra.me and probably on whatever social media still exists at the time you’re reading this.

Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.

Annelid and Leveret met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. They found each other in a torn-up nation, peering through propaganda to grasp a deeper truth. And in a demon-haunted wood, another act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey throughout the ages. No world can hold them, no life can bind them, and they'll never leave each other behind.

Tracing two souls through endless lifetimes, Rakesfall is a virtuosic exploration of what stories can be. As Annelid and Leveret reincarnate ever deeper into the future, they will chase the edge of human possibility, in a dark science fiction epic unlike anything you've read before.

DK Nnuro is a Ghanaian-born writer and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (UI). He is currently curator of special projects at the Stanley Museum of Art at UI and adjunct assistant professor in the English Department there. His debut novel, What Napoleon Could Not Do (2023), was one of Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List picks and the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award in Fiction. The book was also shortlisted for the VCU Cabell Fisrt Novel Prize and The New American Voices Award.

America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of three characters with ties to Africa in this gripping novel. When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle. Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife--a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, "what Napoleon could not do" she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. Wilder's view of America differs markedly from his wife's, as he's spent his life railing against the racism and marginalization that are part of life for every African American living here.

For these three, their desires and ambitions highlight the promise and the disappointment that life in a new country offers. How each character comes to understand this and how each learns from both their dashed hopes and their fulfilled dreams lie at the heart of what makes What Napoleon Could Not Do such a compelling, insightful read.

VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA and DK NNURO in conversation with Karis McPherson, BUILDING BRIDGES PANEL 7