Grace Spulak is a writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico. She is the author of Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Rising Writer Prize, selected by K-Ming Chang. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine's 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.

"The prose is unflinching and raw. . . . Amid the women's painful, intimate instances of introspection, the stories refuse to oversimplify."
--Foreword Reviews

"With care and attention to its brilliantly complicated and kaleidoscopic characters, Magdalena Is Brighter than You Think is a breathtaking collection that is rooted in place, people, and the full scope of who you are and who you get to be. Exploring queerness, gender, poverty, generational trauma, and the ways in which we are formed and form others, the stories in this collection have the scope of sagas and the intimacy of untold secrets. With precise language and endings that open up, reverberate, and resound with complex and multifaceted song, these stories gaze clear-eyed at what life is for those who are marginalized, but also what life can be. With sentences that ricochet off the page, this book shows us how to sit with the wholeness of existence, the persistence of injustice, and the unresolved question of whether change is possible, both personal and collective."
--K-Ming Chang, author of Exhausted Monsters

"Searing, seething, and utterly gorgeous, these stories take us to the dark border where reality and art collide to make truth. In this collection, life and death have equal weight, offering both pain and pleasure in language that is both timeless and totally new. Grace Spulak is an unflinching new voice in fiction, and one to watch." --Adrienne Celt, author of End of the World House

"Grace Spulak is a courageous, daring storyteller who doesn't look away from the most damaged, difficult, or tender subjects. They write unflinchingly about poverty in America, shining a light on broken systems and the crushing effects of capitalism on the poor and working class. The complicated and surprising characters in these compelling stories are doing their best to survive--and, occasionally, they find intimacy with other people, with the dead, or with the ever-present stark, stunning New Mexico landscape. Spulak writes about gender, queerness, desire, trauma, and violence in ways that feel dangerous and alive. These are difficult, important stories burning with truth. A wonderful new voice and debut collection." --Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star

"Spulak's stories are as tough as the lives they explore, exposing the hurting and healing all around us, in places and people too often overlooked by mainstream literature. Emotionally demanding and deeply compassionate, this is an extraordinary debut from a writer to watch." --Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion

Publisher: Autumn House Press

Pub date: 2026-04-21

Length: 218 pages