JAIMEE WRISTON COLBERT is the author of a novel in stories, Dream Lives of Butterflies (2007, from BkMk --Bookmark-- Press of the University of Missouri, Kansas City), which won the gold medal (first place) in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards in the Short Stories Fiction category, and was a Finalist in the USABookNews Best Books of 2007 Awards and the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards; the novel, Climbing the God Tree (1998, Helicon Nine Editions), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, and the short stories collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile (1994, Zephyr), winner of the Zephyr Publishing Prize. Her stories have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, twice selected as a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and have been published in numerous journals, including: TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Green Mountains Review, Snake Nation Review, Louisiana Literature, and anthologized in Ohio Short Fiction and Peculiar Pilgrims, Stories from the Left Hand of God. Several stories have been broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." She has had stories anthologized in Ohio Short Fiction, and Peculiar Pilgrims - Stories From the Left Hand of God, and a story presented at the 2007 Boston Fiction Festival, and performed throughout Maine by PCA Great Performances. Originally from Hawaii, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.

LINKS:

Read an excerpt on the Sundress Publications website.

An excerpt from Dream Lives of Butterflies:

The manager's son hovers behind the leafless oak, huddling there as if it could cover him, shade him, though it's January and there's no shade or any need for it. He scratches at the baby fat on his cheek, tugs it a bit, both cheeks, in the upward direction; up and away, like being lifted by his face one moment, and when he's set back down he's magically older, more fully formed, the sculpted perfection of the man he wishes he could see himself becoming.

He's watching the pregnant girl from 211-D, who's staring at an empty wooden crib stuck there between his father's prairie garden and the garbage dumpsters. The crib is white, a knot of little yellow ducks painted at the head. She's just standing, leaning up against nothing at all, though her posture is thrust back a little as if she really is leaning, short pale hands anchored on her narrow hips, maybe to support the weight of the baby, he thinks, poking out in front. Otherwise, she's the slick straight shape of a pencil. You'd never guess a baby's there. In fact, the first time he saw her from the back, that sort of jaunty walk of hers, no hips, sleek hair streaming off her neck, dark yellow arrow of it pointing down at nothing in particular, he had thoughts about her and immediately needed to see her face. It's in the face you can tell about a person. But her face, when he saw it, was
blank.

A cat leaps from out of nowhere into the crib, and it startles them both, she jumping back a little, he letting out a sound he should've (oh man, why didn't he?) kept to himself. Because then, of course, she whips around and sees him there, watching her. And it's not the first time.

She sucks in her lower lip, You again? I've seen you...