Interview with O. Henry Prize Winner Jane Kalu
With her quietly arresting fiction, Jane Kalu has emerged as a distinct and compelling voice.
Her O. Henry Prize– and Pushcart Prize-winning story Sickled stunned readers with its stark and tender rendering of familial rupture, silence, and survival. Across her work, Kalu brings a rare precision to emotional ambiguity, crafting characters who live inside systems they can’t name but deeply feel. These characters move through silence like it’s a second language and perform resilience even as they begin to fray. Jasmine Colorado spoke with Jane about what drives that clarity, and what follows is a conversation about voice, vulnerability, and the risks of telling stories that refuse to make the reader comfortable.
Jasmine Colorado:
Your stories move in that space between speech and silence, what isn’t said but is deeply understood. What draws you to writing stories that are quieter on the surface but turbulent underneath?
Jane Kalu:
I think part of it is that I grew up in a space where the most important things were never spoken directly. They lived in gesture, tone, in absence. I learned to listen not just to what people said, but to what they avoided, what they whispered after someone left the room, what was communicated through a look passed between adults across a dinner table. That taught me early that power lives in the unsaid, and that silence can be both survival and strategy.
So, in my writing, I’m not interested in spectacle for its own sake. I’m interested in the way people navigate oppressive systems quietly, in how they repress or redirect their desires and shame without always naming them. That quiet is often mistaken for passivity, especially in women characters, but I see it as cunning. And more than that, I think it mirrors the psychological experience of trauma or cultural dissonance, where you can’t always articulate what’s happening, but it’s shaping you nonetheless. Writing into that silence lets me represent the kind of truths I grew up knowing were real, even if they weren’t spoken aloud.
Jasmine Colorado:
It’s interesting you say that, because even though your fiction is quiet, it doesn’t feel passive. It feels charged. And in many ways, your characters are surrounded by noise, not literal noise, but the constant hum of community presence. People are always watching and judging. There’s this sense that your characters are shaped not just by their own desires but by how they’re being perceived. I’m thinking of stories like “The Lucky Bastard” and “The Lives We Lived”, even “Upper Avenue”. Can you talk about that dynamic and how the presence of the community functions in your work?
Jane Kalu:
Yes, I’m very interested in gossip. I think gossip gets dismissed far too easily, especially when it’s linked to women or to the kinds of unofficial, everyday speech often seen as part of an informal economy of language. But if you pay close attention to how gossip works, it’s doing serious labor. It regulates behavior. It reinforces norms. It’s the mechanism by which shame is assigned or absolved. It can even act as a kind of counter-surveillance, a way of keeping power accountable when official channels are either unavailable or corrupt.
In my stories, I think of gossip as a current that moves beneath the plot. It’s how characters come to understand themselves through the mirror of what others believe about them. I’m fascinated by how they perform versions of themselves based on what they think the community is saying—or will say—about them. So I try to write with a kind of double voice: the character’s interiority, and the communal voice that informs what they say, how they act, and what they choose to hide. I think of gossip as dramaturgy, really. It’s part of the theater of everyday life. You perform who you are in a space, not just based on your desires, but on what you fear being said about you. That’s a very Nigerian thing, but also a very human one. And it’s incredibly rich terrain for fiction.
Jasmine Colorado:
How do you think of this dramaturgy when it comes to writing children and young adults? Because your stories are often from that perspective. What draws you to writing those younger perspectives?
Jane Kalu:
I think children are often sharper observers than adults, especially in emotionally complex environments. They’re still learning the rules, so they notice the rules. They feel the rupture when things don’t add up, even if they can’t articulate it. That gap between their perception and their vocabulary is a space I love to write into. It’s tender, but it’s also eerie, because you’re watching someone become shaped by things they don’t yet have the tools to name. And children don’t perform the same way adults do. They mimic, they test, they transgress, but they haven’t fully internalized the shame systems yet.
So there’s this fascinating moment where they’re on the cusp of understanding their role in a system that’s much older than them. That’s when the stakes are highest: when a young person starts to realize they’re not free. That moment of recognition is when a character either bends or breaks, and I try to write right up against that edge.
Jasmine Colorado:
You’re also really invested in writing about systems like gender roles, spiritual economies, politics, and how people maneuver within these systems. But your work never feels like sociology. It’s deeply emotional. How do you keep the story from becoming overwhelmed by the systems it’s trying to critique?
Jane Kalu:
I honestly don’t think about that when I’m writing. I just write about people. I try to keep the emotional core of the character at the center of the work, I think of questions like: What does this person want? What are they afraid of losing? Who are they trying to protect—or betray—and why? And because, of course, we’re all entraped in one system or the other, these issues emerge naturally.
I think that emotional specificity is what keeps the system from flattening into abstraction. I think if I do my job well, you don’t come away with a thesis, you come away with a feeling. A recognition. Maybe even discomfort. Because the story didn’t give you a clean villain or a neat solution, but gave you a tangle of motives that implicates you too. And that, to me, is the most honest way to represent a system; not through moralizing, but through entanglement.
Jasmine Colorado:
That makes a lot of sense, especially this idea of implicating the reader emotionally rather than delivering a neat critique. It’s a kind of witnessing, but one that implicates both the character and the audience. That brings up another question: Do you think writers have a responsibility to witness? Or is that too simple a frame?
Jane Kalu:
I do think bearing witness is part of the writer’s work, but I don’t think it’s ever neutral. There’s always a power dynamic in who gets to witness and whose stories get told. So for me, it’s not just about exposing harm, it’s about being careful with how that harm is shown, and what the reader is invited to do with it. I’m not interested in writing stories that make readers feel good just for looking. I want them to feel unsettled and implicated. To ask themselves: why does this story move me? What am I doing with that feeling? And I would like not to provide a neat answer to those questions.
Sometimes I think we mistake recognition for change. We read something emotionally challenging, and then we just move on because a resolution has been handed to us. I’d rather end on discomfort than give a clean sense of closure. Not because I want to punish the reader, but because I want to honor the weight of what’s been witnessed. Some stories aren’t meant to soothe. They’re meant to sit with you, and maybe even shift something.
Jasmine Colorado:
Does that ever make you nervous about how people will respond, especially readers from your own community? Do you ever feel like telling the truth as you see it might be received as disloyal or even dangerous?
Jane Kalu:
Oh yes! I feel that tension all the time! In my community, silence can be a kind of protection; we often keep certain truths unspoken to avoid shame or even conflict. But when I write about those things, I break that silence. I’m saying: look at this, don’t look away. That can feel like a betrayal, and it makes me nervous, because I love my culture deeply. But love, to me, is not the same as protecting a lie. For me, part of our work as writers is to pierce the performance and show what’s behind the veil, no matter how uncomfortable it is.
Jasmine Colorado:
If that’s the rupture, then what does repair look like? What kind of world do you hope your work participates in creating?
Jane Kalu:
For me, repair sometimes means making space for the truth and naming what has been hidden, without dressing it up or turning away. That honesty allows us to begin to reckon with what hurts, even if we never fully heal in our lifetime.
I want my work to be a kind of speculative archive. A future reader should be able to look back and say: This is how we loved; This is how we failed each other; This is what we refused to forget. If my stories can linger and shape the emotional logic of a place long after the facts have faded, then I’ve done what I set out to do. That, to me, is a kind of repair.
Jasmine Colorado’s BIO:
Jas Colorado is a Central American diaspora writer and MFA student at the University of New Mexico. Her work moves through the blurred borders of migration, queerness, and the ancestral spaces between religion and magic. Jas is the poetry editor of Blue Mesa Review, with forthcoming publications in Iron Horse Literary Review and the Journal of Transnational American Studies.
Jane Kalu’s BIO:
Jane Kalu is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her short fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Best Short Stories 2025, American Short Fiction, Narrative, Boston Review, Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She has received a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize and has been awarded fellowships from the Sewanee Writer’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, StoryKnife, and American Short Fiction. Jane is at work on a novel and a short story collection.
