Robin Lee Lovelace | 2025 Fiction Chapbook
From it’s opening line, “The call came in as ‘snakebite.’” Robin Lee Lovelace’s 2025 Tusculum Review Fiction Chapbook Prize-winning story wraps readers in its coils and doesn’t let go until the final sentence. Readers follow the EMT narrator as he faces his biggest fear on the job while grappling with another slippery, more personal, threat.
Artist Daeja Sutherland’s illustrations, which combine the golden age illustrators’ specificity and drawing facility and the energy/urgency of our current era, capture the chill and menace of one hot day in Phoenix.
Guest judge Jaime Cortez calls “Snakebite” “harrowing and darkly funny . . . It went right into my dreams.”
“The action, both physical and emotional, were very visceral and really affected me. I love being stirred up. Not just any writer can do that. Robin does. This author is a person who really gets people. Who really observes people.”
The chapbook includes eight original illustrations in traditional media by Daeja Sutherland, four of which are only in this stand-alone chapbook, not the journal issue.
Robin Lee Lovelace is a mixed-race African American author who usually writes short fiction. Robin’s novella, Savonne, Not Vonny, won or was short-listed for numerous awards, including the Etchings Press Novella of the Year in 2019 and the CIBA in 2021. Robin’s short story Uncle won the Marguerite McGlinn Short Fiction Award in 2021. Robin was recognized as an honoree by Indiana Humanities for her work in fiction in 2020 and 2024. When Robin is not obsessively revising her most recent story, she is working in her flower garden, cooking Italian food for her husband, or walking her rowdy dog, Lucy.
Daeja Sutherland is an illustrator, comic artist, and writer. She loves exploring cultural, political, and social questions through illustration and writing and has a particular obsession with fantasy creatures like orcs. She works primarily in traditional media: graphite, ink, and watercolor. Daeja is a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design, where she completed her BFA in Illustration with a minor in Fiction Writing. At Parsons, she completed “The Back of the Orchard,” a 20-page graphite and digitally colored comic, which inspired her to pursue a career in comics and illustration. You can find her on instagram @daejasuthrland and send inquiries to daejasutherland@gmail.com.
Jaime Cortez is a California writer and artist based in Watsonville and the SF Bay Area. His writing and drawings have appeared in “Kindergarten: Experimental Writing For Children” (Black Radish Press),”No Straight Lines” (Fantagraphics), “Street Art San Francisco” (Abrams Press), and “Infinite Cities” (UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel “Sexile” for AIDS Project Los Angeles. His debut short story collection, Gordo, was published in 2021 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. Gordo received national acclaim from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It was nominated for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for fiction, and was named a best book of the year by National Public Radio and Bookpage. Cortez received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MFA from UC Berkeley. Jaime’s website is www.jaimecortez.org.
