Anthony Veasna So

Stockton, California, and the Cambodian families who settled there are the whole world of Afterparties, nine stories published by Ecco in August 2021. Anthony Veasna So was born in Stockton on 20 February 1992 to refugee parents from Battambang province; his father ran an auto repair shop, his mother handled claims for the Social Security Administration. He read art and English at Stanford and studied for an MFA at Syracuse with Jonathan Dee and Dana Spiotta, teaching along the way at Colgate and at a support centre for refugees and immigrants in Oakland. His stories are comic and unsparing at once, moving between donut shops, badminton courts, gay desire and the inheritance the Khmer Rouge years left with children who never saw them. So died in San Francisco on 8 December 2020, aged twenty-eight, before the book reached print. It won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award.