CHRISTINA Collins grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, devouring books, looking for secret gardens, and using “wicked” as an adverb. She spent a year in England, as a visiting student at the University of Oxford, and three years in Northern Virginia, where she earned her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Nowadays she lives in Northern Ireland, where she earned her PhD in creative writing from Queen’s University Belfast. Over the years, she has worked in editorial roles, taught at universities, and been to 21 countries and counting.
Her debut novel, After Zero, was a 2019 NCTE/CLA Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts, and her short fiction and poetry have appeared in more than a dozen periodicals and anthologies. Christina received the 2021 C.S. Lewis Writer’s Bursary award and has held residencies at the Irish Writers Centre (Roaming Writer-in-Residence), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Art Commune program in Armenia.
Elise carries a notebook full of tallies, each page marking a day spent at her new public school, each stroke …