Dark Tourist: Essays - Paperback

by Hasanthika Sirisena (Author)

Finalist for the 2022 LAMBDA literary award in bisexual nonfiction

Winner of the 2021 Gournay Prize

"Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection." -Kirkus

"Sirisena explores how stories can become a 'talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another's pain' in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut ... [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into." -Publishers Weekly

Dark tourism-visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others-takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena's stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father's stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka-the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner-to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.

Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art-and with language's ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.

Author Biography

Hasanthika Sirisena's essays and prose have appeared in The Georgia Review, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Story Quarterly, Narrative and other magazines. Their work has been anthologized in Best New American Voices and named a notable story by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. They have received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award recipient. They are also the author of the short story collection The Other One and the essay collection Dark Tourist which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Prize. Hasanthika has also throughout their career developed extensive connections in the writing community. They for example, currently a prose editor at Tupelo Press. They have been a Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers Conference and been on the jury for the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Asian American Journalist Association Arts & Culture prize with New York Times Arts & Leisure editor Andrew Lavallee. They currently teach workshops for Writer's Digest and have contacts at Poets & Writers. They have also forged strong relationships with the Asian American Writer's Workshop and the Asian American Arts Alliance both in New York, both of whom have actively supported her debut collection. In addition, Hasanthika has been teaching on the university level for over twelve years. They first taught at the City College of New York and still has a strong relationship with the faculty there. They've taught at Columbia University and are currently an associate professor at Susquehanna University and also teach at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.