Erin Slaughter is the author of the story collection
A Manual for How to Love Us, forthcoming in March 2023, and two books of poetry:
The Sorrow Festival
(2022), and
I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (2019). Slaughter is editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press
The Hunger and holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University. Originally from Texas, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and was awarded the Edward H. and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellowship.
At Electric Lit Slaughter tagged ten novels and stories about women living at the edge of their animal desires, including:
Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen Kirby
Each story in this phenomenal debut collection is a building block of a universe where women’s joys and burdens swirl at the molten core—a world where women 
encounter abuse, cat-calling, slut-shaming, and a grab-bag of familiar misogynies, and instead of quietly tolerating them, employ (often fantastical) means to confront them. The titular story is a reimagining of Greek mythological figure Cassandra, who uses her gift of prophecy to glimpse a future where women finally get a leg-up on the slog of womanhood, a future with access to tampons, Twizzlers, yoga, and epidurals. Though Cassandra knows she is fated to be killed by the Trojans, she holds the satisfying knowledge that they’ll be reduced by history to a condom brand. This story, which opens the book, sets the tone for the unapologetic, fiery lens through which Kirby breaks the fourth wall on tropes about girls and women, redefining their stories with new vulnerability and power.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
(2022), and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (2019). Slaughter is editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger and holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University. Originally from Texas, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and was awarded the Edward H. and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellowship.
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