by Lee Ann Roripaugh (Author)
Winner of the 2022 Moon City Short Fiction Award
Reveal Codes is a collection of short stories mapping the ways in which people, and other animals, read and misread, communicate and miscommunicate, mask and unmask, with and around one another. In the abandonware word processing program, WordPerfect, "reveal codes" is the command that reveals the coding behind the face of a document. The stories in this collection spiral around a (bio)semiology of the multiplicities of desire. In a series of pas de deux, or duets, the characters in these stories try to make themselves legible to family, friends, and lovers--revealing their messy patterns, their bare-faced vulnerabilities. These are stories that unfurl tentacles of longing made with language in an attempt to decode the illegibility of an incoherent and inchoate surrounding world.Author Biography
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, mostly recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a "Best Book of 2019" by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, and named one of the "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019" by Book Riot. Their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released in early 2023. Winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, she has published fiction in Story Magazine, Cream City Review, North American Review, Hotel Amerika, The Offing, and Moon City Review, among other journals. Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.