DOMINION

A Black Southern family drama that deals as much in tenderness as brutality, this novel reveals the many sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy.

The narrativ is built from the life of a Black church in Mississippi and the family at its center. Told mostly through two women who love the church's favored son, the youngest child of the Pastor, known as Wonderboy, it reveals the ways in which they cannot see the danger and darkness he is capable of bringing into the world. DOMINION examines how communities unwittingly protect the predators in their midst and reckons with the legacies of the evil men do. The Winfrey family stands at the top of Dominion, Mississippi society. Reverend Sabre Winfrey heads up Seven Seals Baptist Church and owns WDOZ, a house on every street in the White House neighborhood, and a barber shop, where he sings lead tenor in the quartet. His wife Priscilla, daughter of one of Dominion's finest families, is one of the most beautiful first ladies in the Delta. They have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboyno one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But after a surprising encounter with a stranger, Wonderboy finds himself confronted by questions he'd never imagined; his response will send shockwaves through the entire community. And the women who love them will be forced to recognize their own part in enabling the everyday violence, the casual sins of these men. Addie Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and is based in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Oxford American's "Best of the South" issue, Midnight & Indigo's speculative fiction anthology, Columbia Journal, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on the Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Radio. She was the inaugural recipient of the FSG Writer's Fellowship. Dominion is her first novel.