Photo credit: Tehsuan Glover

Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in Portmore, Jamaica, and raised in Queens, NY. She’s currently a public librarian and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Newark, NJ.

THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY

American Book Award Winner || OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction Winner || PEN/Hemingway Finalist || Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Shortlist || LA Times Book Prizes Art Seidenbaum Award Finalist || Audie Award for Literary Fiction & Classics Finalist

“An intriguing debut with an inventive spin on the generational family saga.”—Kirkus Reviews

“…These Ghosts Are Family is a tale of the most monstrous acts: intimate betrayals with unthinkable consequences.” —The Atlantic

“Her first chapter delivers a stunning series of second-person character portraits; they build into a centuries-spanning epic about race, trauma, and the weight of a lie.” —Entertainment Weekly

“There is magic in these pages.” —BookPage

“It is a measure of Card’s skill that we come to know these characters in three dimensions, even as they struggle to know themselves.” —Washington Post

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Recent Publications

First Fiction 2023: Tyriek White | Poets & Writers

Tyriek White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy. The novel alternates between the stories of Key, a doula who can see and communicate with the dead, and her son, Colly, who lives alone in the family’s apartment in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, raising himself after Key dies from cancer. Colly inherits his mother’s and grandmother’s connection to the spiritual world, which allows Key to remain a presence in his life, guiding him even after her death.

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Peach Pit: Stories | DZANC BOOKS

A stunning anthology of fierce and dangerous women, featuring stories from Lauren Groff, Deesha Philyaw, K-Ming Chang, and thirteen other award-winning and bestselling authors. 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.”

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Brit Bennett on Her New Novel, Favorite Writers, and Zoom Fatigue | Glamour

Few debut novelists receive the accolades that followed the publication of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers. The novel, which she began writing while still an undergraduate at Stanford University, became a New York Times best-seller and was optioned by Warner Bros., with Kerry Washington signed on to produce. With the publication of The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s critical and popular appeal continues to soar.

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Selected Press

Is This the World’s Most Glamorous Book Club? | Town & Country

Spotlight on Jamaican Voices in Novels, Poetry, Stories & Memoir | New York Public Library

Presenting the Finalists for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards | The Paris Review

In Maisy Card’s ‘These Ghosts Are Family,’ resentments are passed down from one generation to the next | Washington Post

Living With our Ghosts: A Conversation With Maisy Card | The Rumpus

An Epic Novel Haunted by the Ghosts of Colonialism | The Atlantic

Maisy Card: “There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.” | Guernica

These juicy family sagas bring addicting drama to spring reading: Review | Entertainment Weekly

For 30 Years, He Assumed the Identity of His Dead Friend. Now He’s Coming Clean | New York Times