Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from West Tennessee. His work seeks to reanimate the experiences, beliefs, and language of his southern black ancestors in order to better understand the surreality of his black present. He has received support for his writing and research from Northwestern University, the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst, and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. Currently, he is a fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin.