The Shawl of Midnight is a coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a hero’s journey set in a world between worlds. Politically, Kashmir is land contested by Pakistan and India.  Spiritually, the mind responds to the dark silence between midnight and the sky’s uncertain protection. Here is a world of birds who know no boundaries, of wide-ranging mountains that seem to have been arising forever from nothing at all, and of multiple sister-rivers that create all the forms of life itself.  The novel asks how people process their family traumas, their religious impulses, their countries’ constraints, the ways they present themselves to others—and to themselves.   The Shawl of Midnight explores the depths of family relationships, how people change over time and distance, and how we might discover through our own pressures and actions what we are shaped by--exactly what we are made of, and where home truly is. 

Jacqueline St. Joan is the author of My Sisters Made a Light, (Press 53), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction; What Remains: poetry (Turkey Buzzard Press); and is co-editor of Women, Law, and Literature in the U.S. published by Northeastern University Press, Re-stitching the Sky, a chapbook set in letterpress, and numerous essays and scholarly articles. Her latest short story, “Mississippi Goddam,” was published in Spring 2022 in Valley Voices and “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful,” was published in The Missouri Review. She has a law degree from the University of Denver and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Visit her website: www.jacquelinestjoan.com