Cleo Qian (she/her) is a fiction writer and poet from California. She received her MFA from NYU. Her work has appeared in over 20 outlets; was a
winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and supported by Sundress Academy for the Arts. By day, she works at a nonprofit and reads self-help articles on how to be happy.
Her debut short story collection is
Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go.
At Electric Lit Qian tagged nine books about women’s loneliness and the search for connection, including:
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura is an expert at subtle affect and building tension under a minimalist surface: sparse sentences, spare plot. Intimacies, following a 
woman who moves to The Hague to work as a court interpreter during a trial for a prominent war criminal, is laden with the knowledge of separation between self and others that so often creates alienation. This includes her relationship with Aidan, a married man with whom she begins an affair that she suspects can go nowhere. This narrator, however, is more accepting of this alienation than other protagonists on this list—and it is with this clinical detachment and self-awareness of the boundaries between which we can connect to others that the murky, sometimes sinister intimacies of this novel plays out.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and supported by Sundress Academy for the Arts. By day, she works at a nonprofit and reads self-help articles on how to be happy.
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