The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s esteemed literary journal Michigan Quarterly Review celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2021. The first commemorative edition publishes in January 2021 and features Kalisha’s very first published fiction, the story “Card Parties.” The story covers four women friends in Chicago who find their weekly card parties interrupted by a strange new girl who may not be who she says she is. See all contributors and order your copy HERE.

“Card Parties” was accepted for Spring 2003 by then editor and poet Laurence Goldstein with contributing editors including Joyce Carol Oates. The story won a 2002 Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award at the Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers Conference at Chicago State University.