Apollo and Daphne

Posted on 23 February 2018
- poetry
- Publications

Published in Penn Review 50.2

“One day, you will find me climbing
a stool in the Galleria Borghese, stretching
until my body/my face/my breasts/the notch
in my hip above where hands settle
presses Daphne’s.”

Read the rest of the poem here.

Leigh Camacho Rourks

Leigh Camacho Rourks is the managing editor for Rougarou, a journal of literature and arts out of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she is pursuing her PhD. This year, her short story “Moon Trees” was awarded the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and her story “Pinched Magnolias” received the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Pank, and Greensboro Review.

Leigh Camacho Rourks is a Cuban-American author who lives and works in Central Florida, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Beacon College. She is the recipient of the St. Lawrence Book Award, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize, and her work has been shortlisted for several other awards. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, TriQuarterly, December Magazine, and Greensboro Review.

Leigh Camacho Rourks

“Hot damn, this is a powerhouse debut. Leigh Camacho Rourks deserves a hallowed
space on the shelf between Flannery O'Connor and Donald Ray Pollock.”

—Benjamin Percy

Moon Trees and Other Orphans is a gritty collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love. Filled with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions as they go. Populated by gun toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, both beautiful and dangerous.

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