Author

Cai Emmons, author

Cai Emmons, authorCai Emmons is the author of the novels His Mother’s Son (Harcourt), The Stylist (HarperCollins), and Weather Woman (Red Hen Press), and a sequel to Weather Woman, called Sinking Islands (Red Hen Press), UNLEASHED  (Dutton), and LIVID (Red Hen Press).  Her story collection Vanishing, winner of the 2018 Leapfrog Fiction Contest was published in March 2020.  His Mother’s Son received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, was a Booksense and Literary Guild selection, was translated into French and German, was reviewed by O Magazine and The Economist, and won an Oregon Book Award (the Ken Kesey Award) for fiction. About The Stylist, one of the earliest novels featuring a transgender character, Booklist said: “With family relations as twisted as a French braid and language as vivid as a platinum dye job, Emmons’ potent novel features magnetic characters and complex and compelling secrets.” Weather Woman, Emmons’s novel about a meteorologist who discovers she has the power to change the weather, has been featured in such places as LitHub, The Rumpus, Book Riot, Montana Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio, The CCNY Grad Center, among others (see more coverage under “News”). The novel won a Nautilus Book Award and has been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Sinking Islands won a May Sarton Award.

Emmons’s short fiction and essays have appeared in such periodicals as The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Today, LitHub, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, TriQuarterly, Narrative, Arts and Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, The Santa Monica Review, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The New York Post, and Portland Monthly. A story of hers was a finalist for the Missouri Review Jeffrey Smith Editor’s Prize; another was a finalist in the Narrative Fiction Contest. She has received fellowships at The Albee Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Playa, Caldera, and Moulin a Nef in France, and has been interviewed on a variety of podcasts including Final Draft, A Mighty Blaze, and Give and Take.

Before Emmons began writing fiction she was a dramatist. Her early plays (Mergatroid and When Petulia Comes) were staged in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Theatre Genesis, and The American Place Theater. She studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where her thesis film won a Student Academy Award. In New York she wrote, directed, and edited independent and industrial films, before moving to Los Angeles where she wrote feature-length screenplays (optioned but unproduced) and several teleplays for the CBS series “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.”

Emmons holds a BA from Yale University, and two MFAs, one in film from New York University, one in fiction from the University of Oregon. She has taught at various colleges and universities, including the University of Southern California and the University of Oregon where she taught fiction and screenwriting from 2002-2018. She is now a full-time writer.

Cai Emmons Documentary by Sandra Lucklow

Emmons takes us to the very heart of an American tragedy, the kind of story we usually only know at the arms-reach remove of TV news, and illuminates it with such vivid insight, such emotional intensity, such imaginative sympathy that we can't stop turning the pages.

–Peter Ho Davies, author of The Ugliest House in the World

Cai Emmons puts a human face on our most urgent concerns. Written with such terrifying precision that the prose burns on the page, but also brilliantly nuanced, this is writing worthy of the psychologically complex characters and their crucial drama of compassion and violence, trauma and tenderness.

–Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes

Suspenseful, edgy and exact, His Mother's Son explores the dark country between what we know and how we are nonetheless compelled to behave. Beautifully written, compulsively readable.

–Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

With family relations as twisted as a French braid and language as vivid as a platinum dye job, Emmons’ potent novel features magnetic characters and complex and compelling secrets.

–Booklist

A riveting, zip-line ride over the narrowing chasm between [Jana's] past and present lives. . . . Emmons sustains an amazing level of emotional tension....

–The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)

The slowly building tension is by turns sickening and exquisite.

–Portland Oregonian

Lovely writing . . . Emmons' emphasis is on her characters, and she draws them well.

–Seattle Times

An unsettling and powerful debut novel.

–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Emmons . . . has an eye for the grating intimacy of small-town life and a fine ear for suggestive metaphors. . . . Unusual and memorable.

–The Economist

Gripping. Brings home the power and terror of maternal love.

–O Magazine

Gorgeous writing throughout makes for an unusually affecting and memorable debut.

–Kirkus Reviews

Accomplished playwright and filmmaker Emmons tests chilly waters in this ambitious, unsettling debut.

–Publishers Weekly

A gift of a book, an affecting story of violence and forgiveness.

–Bookpage