Q&A with the Author, Sunil Yapa

A finalist for the 2017 PEN/Faulkner award, Yapa’s debut novel, <em>Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist</em>, was a Barnes &amp; Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick and was named one of the best books of 2016 by Amazon, <em>Time </em>magazine, <em>The Washington Post</em>, <em>Bustle</em>, and others. Set during one day of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the novel is described as “fast-paced and unflinching” by <em>The New Yorker</em>, “a genuine tour-de-force” by <em>The Seattle Times</em>, and “generation-defining” by <em>The Toronto Star</em>. Yapa’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in <em>American Short Fiction</em>, <em>Guernica</em>, <em>O Magazine</em>, <em>Poets &amp; Writers</em>, <em>The Margins</em>, <em>Hyphen</em>, <em>Slice</em>, <em>LitHub</em>, and others. He teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada College. <em>Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist </em>has been selected as the next book for the Roanoke Valley Reads community reading project.

Funding provided by the Beanstalk Fund and the Benedict Fiction Fund.