Category: News

Patricia Grace King, winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, grew up in western North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK, where she now resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Florida Review‘s Leiby Prize, and the Kore Press Fiction Award.

Her Drue Heinz-winning book, Those Who Vanish, features stories that follow martyrs, missionaries, guerrillas, and gringos across Central America to the Midwestern United States. This year’s judge says of the collection, “King’s unrelenting exploration of our need to survive while retaining our humanity propels these narratives into surprising and heart-breaking terrain.”

Those Who Vanish is set to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 1, 2026, and is available for preorder now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of the story collection, designed by Alex Wolfe, alongside a Q&A with King about its creation.

Continue reading “See the cover for Those Who Vanish by Patricia Grace King” →

Jan Saenz is a Houston-based author, poet, and educator whose debut novel, 200 Monas, is a riotous adventure that oscillates between feeling like a panic attack and getting a stomach ache from laughing so much. Pitched as being for fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda, Saenz follows Arvy Keening, a college senior who discovers a stash of a powerful pleasure-inducing drug in her dead mother’s closet and is given 48 hours by two dealers to sell all 200 pills or die, sending her and the campus dealer Wolf on a frantic, chaotic race through their college town that forces Arvy to confront buried grief, risky desires, and the strange ways people cope with loss.

We asked Saenz to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

Continue reading “200 Monas author Jan Saenz is reading a smorgasbord of books” →

Yesena Barragan is a historian of the nineteenth-century Americas and Atlantic and Pacific worlds, focusing on race, slavery, and emancipation. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History from Columbia University and is now an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

In her new book, In Latin America You Could Be Free: An African American History, she explores a forgotten nineteenth-century geography of Black freedom across the Americas. As countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Mexico abolished slavery decades before the United States, Latin America came to occupy a powerful place in abolitionist imagination and strategy.

It will be published by Basic Books on November 10, 2026.

Debuitul is honored to reveal the cover of the book, which was designed by Alex Camlin, along with a Q&A with Barragan about how it was created.

Continue reading “See the cover for In Latin America You Could Be Free by Yesena Barragan” →