Grace Spulak’s debut collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of Autumn House Press’ 2025 Rising Writer Prize, gathers eleven stories set mostly in rural New Mexico among people pushed to the margins. The lives here belong to queer women, non-binary folks, and kids who’ve slipped or been shoved past the edge of any safety net: the poor, the dispossessed, those for whom institutional neglect and violence are not interruptions but the terms of daily life. Darkness is the backdrop – yet the stories are less interested in tallying damage than in tracking the ways these characters angle toward a scrap of light and try to improvise an exit where none really exists.
With a JD from Harvard Law School and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers—where she and I first met—Grace brings a double education in law and literature to Magdalena’s formal decisions. Nearly a decade representing children and young people in New Mexico’s courts has made her attuned to the small, skewed survival narratives people build when no one believes them, and the collection moves through those registers: the borrowed textures of trial transcripts and corporate jargon, the slippages in point of view, the sentence that can withhold and indict in the same breath.
She and I spoke via email about these formal gambits and about why fiction, precisely because it fractures, distorts, and rearranges, sometimes get closer to what’s happened than any official record. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Continue reading “Guided by Voices: Grace Spulak on Violence, Justice, and Seizing the Right to Speak”