Anna Vangala Jones is the author of Turmeric & Sugar, her debut short story collection. It is out from Thirty West Publishing as of May 28, 2021. You can purchase your copy from Bookshop, Thirty West, most anywhere books are sold, or request it for your local library.
More Praise for Turmeric & Sugar: Stories
Turmeric & Sugar is the long-awaited debut collection by one of my favorite short story writers. Anna Vangala Jones masterfully moves through thoughts, moods, and insightful observations in a series of beautiful, memorable stories. She creates a world of nuanced and complex characters in sensory-soaked details with great skill and precision. Turmeric & Sugar is an enriching collection from a hugely talented writer, not to be missed.
— Tara Isabel Zambrano, author of Death, Desire, and Other Destinations
Anna Vangala Jones’s Turmeric & Sugar is a collection of stories that feel like invitations: “Come in, make yourself comfortable, let me show you around.” Her gift for getting to the heart of her characters pulls the reader into each world she describes, each whole, beautiful life. In this collection, Jones hasn’t just created characters—she has revealed their worlds, their souls, their truths, their stories.
— Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You
Reading Anna Vangala Jones’s Turmeric & Sugar feels like being both home and away—in a shiny mirroring of cultures, we are taken into the unique realms of the mind where we find the vulnerability of our own lives right next to us, as if it has been there forever but we only just turned our heads to see. Jones writes with a measure of a poetic philosopher in which each story dreams to find peace and comfort in worlds of words—deep in depth—this collection of stories mixes in all the ingredients of profound prose, majestic and soulful and magical.
— Shome Dasgupta, author of Spectacles
Turmeric & Sugar by Anna Vangala Jones is a marvelous collection. The stories blend fables, realism, darkness, and comedy, sometimes all at the same time.
— James Yates, contributing editor at Longform Fiction
Dan Crawley, author of The Wind, It Swirls, reviewed Turmeric & Sugar for Bending Genres here: Book Review of Turmeric & Sugar: Stories.
Mike Marshall Wilson reviewed and compared the stories to the songs of John Prine here: “All That’s Left to Linger On” by Mike Marshall Wilson.
Jeffrey Yamaguchi reviewed the book here: Book Review: Turmeric & Sugar.
About the Author
Anna’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and interviews have appeared in various print and online publications such as Catapult, Wigleaf, Little Fiction, AAWW’s The Margins, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, TriQuarterly, The MacGuffin, The Rumpus, and Berkeley Fiction Review, among others.
Her short story, “Mae and Me”, published in Catapult, was selected for Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018 list. Her short story, “Doors”, was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize by HAD. Her short story, “You Don’t Have a Place Here” was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize by OKD. Her short story, “Echo”, was nominated for the Best Small Fictions 2020 Anthology by Jellyfish Review. Her short story, “Tape and Glue”, was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize by The MacGuffin.
She is at work on a novel.
She served as Fiction Editor at Lunch Ticket, Editorial Assistant on the Fiction team at Split Lip Magazine, and Social Media Coordinator at Pidgeonholes.
Shannon McLeod, author of Whimsy, interviewed Anna about Turmeric & Sugar: Stories for TriQuarterly here: An Interview with Anna Vangala Jones.
Sukhmony Brar interviewed Anna for Berkeley Fiction Review here: A Case for “the surreal and the strange”: Interview with Anna Vangala Jones, Sudden Fiction Guest Judge.
Anna was born in India but raised in Pennsylvania. She earned her BA from Haverford College in English Literature and her MA from Teachers College, Columbia University in English Education. She spent a semester abroad at The University of Aberdeen in Scotland and she studied Fiction at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Antioch University Los Angeles.
Anna taught English Literature, Creative Writing, Social Justice humanities, and ESL to middle and high school students in Pennsylvania, New York City, and Los Angeles for nearly ten years.
Anna Vangala Jones 