Malawi's Sisters

Hatter's artful, moving novel looks closely at the murder of a young black woman and her family's devastation. Old—and new—questions about race and civil rights in 21st Century America arise alongside the unfolding story of Malawi and those who live in the wake of her loss.

Melanie S. Hatter is the author of Malawi's Sisters, winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, selected by Edwidge Danticat (Four Way Books, 2019), The Color of My Soul, winner of the 2011 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, and Let No One Weep for Me, Stories of Love and Loss. Her short stories have appeared in The Whistling Fire, Defying Gravity, TimBookTu, and Diverse Voices Quarterly. She was a runner-up winner in the Fiction category of the 2015 and 2016 Montgomery Writes contests sponsored by the Maryland Writers’ Association. She is a regular participant in the PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s Writers in Schools program in Washington, D.C., and serves on the board of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.