The Next Chapter Long before award-winning books and starred reviews, Xhenet Aliu, ’01, was a first-gen student commuting to Southern. By Villia Struyk
IT’S
April 3, some two weeks after the release of Xhenet Aliu’s second novel, Everybody Says It’s Everything (Random House), and the awardwinning author has come home. “Southern is my origin story as a writer,” said Aliu, who was on campus for a reading with celebrated poet Jason Labbe, ’01. Labbe, now an instructor in Southern’s creative writing program with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia, has been Aliu’s friend since high school. The two attended Southern together as well, and at the reading he introduced her to the crowd of about 200 with a memory of their early days as undergrads, sitting on campus and sharing their work: “She handed me a three-page assignment done for [Professor of English] Tim Parrish’s class. It began with ‘I used to be beautiful. Everyone said so,’ and it devastated me. . . . Xhenet has one of the strongest voices of any author out there.” That voice has been honed by years of dedication to the craft. She had earned two advanced degrees — an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington
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and a Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alabama — when her first book, Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories (University of Nebraska Press), won the prestigious Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction in 2012. “That award was lifechanging for me, and it gave me the confidence to continue working on the novel which ultimately became Brass,” she says. Brass would go on to earn both the Townsend Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize. Set in Waterbury, Conn., it uses dual timelines
to tell the story of a working-class mother and daughter. The novel, which was lauded as a top book of the year by Real Simple, Elle magazine, and more, explores concepts of identity, family, immigration, and the American Dream. These themes remain central in Everybody Says It’s Everything, which follows Drita and Petrit (Peter), twins born in Albania who are adopted and raised in Connecticut. Set in the 1990s during the war in Kosovo, the story again unfolds through parallel narratives, capturing the emotional distance between the two siblings: one