Celine Aenlle-Rocha
Celine Aenlle-Rocha is an Afro-Latina writer based in New York City, where she attended Columbia University for her MFA in Fiction. Her work has been published in Joyland, Nimrod International Journal, Puerto del Sol, Tahoma Literary Review, The Acentos Review, and others. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and residencies at Art Farm and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. She teaches writing at Columbia University and Writopia Lab.
Tony
By Celine Aenlle-Rocha“Tony” is an original short story from Celine Aenlle-Rocha’s collection in progress, inspired by her own family history. Each story centers on a different descendent of a creole family from Louisiana and depicts how each member’s relationship to their Black identity shifts and transforms over time as the family migrates across the United States. In “Tony” an unnamed family member acts as the family historian. The interplay of the two voices, Tony’s and the narrator’s, reminds us how oral tradition holds a family’s legacy together even when physical and spiritual migrations have torn them apart.
