Aimee Pokwatka

Aimee Pokwatka studied anthropology at North Carolina Greensboro and did an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse. Her first novel, Self-Portrait with Nothing, was published in 2022, and George Saunders called it the work of a genuinely exciting new talent. Its central figure, Pepper Rafferty, is a forensic anthropologist raised by two mothers after being left as a baby on a veterinarian's porch, who worked out at fifteen that her birth mother was the reclusive painter Ula Frost, and who is pulled across continents when Frost disappears. Pokwatka grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and lives in New York state. A second novel, The Parliament, followed.