Amina Gautier
Fiction
Chicago, IL
Amina Gautier, Ph.D., is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Award. Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, and the International Latino Book Award. The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award, and the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award. Gautier has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Camargo Foundation, the Chateau de Lavigny, Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. More than one hundred of her stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Best African American Fiction, Blackbird, Glimmer Train, Latino Book Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and Southern Review among other places. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
Featured Work
So Good to See You
Work Sample by Amina Gautier
They haven’t seen each other since high school, but when their paths cross, they easily recognize in their adult faces the teenagers they remember. They’re running off in opposite directions—no time to talk!—but agree to meet for lunch the next day. Neither calls it a date, but as luck would have it, they’re both single.
They meet on the north side of Chicago, in Edgewater, at the Ann Sather’s on Broadway and Granville. Two tables are being cleared when they enter; they don’t wait long.
Coffees poured and orders given, they settle in to the business of catching up. Fifteen years since they’ve laid eyes on one another. What have they been up to?