Meet the Author
Sybil Baker’s latest novel Apparitions is the winner of the 2024 IPPY Gold Medal in short fiction. She is the author of five books of fiction, including While You Were Gone, which won an IPPY Silver Medal. Her book of nonfiction Immigration Essays was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Guernica, Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, and Critical Flame.
Sybil is a Professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, is the Director of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and is on faculty at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.
Sybil is a woman with Southern roots but with international yearnings: she lived in South Korea for twelve years where she met her South African husband and has family in Turkey, South Africa, and Ireland. She doesn’t like sweet tea but does say y’all.
Praise for 2024 IPPY Gold Medal winner Apparitions:
“This slim page-turner is deceptively complex: part lush travelogue, part twisty love story, part murder mystery. I loved getting to travel along with Simone and Agnes, characters so lively they nearly leap off the page. In Apparitions, Sybil Baker has spun a tale of how our pasts can haunt us, and what happens when women choose alternative paths for their lives.”
-AMY SHEARN, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF ANIMAL INSTINCT, DEAR EDNA SLOAN, and UNSEEN CITY.
“In spare and emotionally heightened prose that calls to mind the work of Annie Ernaux, Sybil Baker’s new novel, Apparitions, is an intense psychological portrait of Simone, a woman haunted by her past. On a trip to Cyprus for her ex-husband’s funeral and bent on revenge, she is visited by a parade of ghosts who warn her not to be misled, paralyzing her with indecision. The book is a story of betrayal, but also one of disappointment and strangling regret. It’s a deeply satisfying mystery, too, as Simone seeks to understand what really happened to the man she once loved.”
– CLIFFORD GARSTANG, AUTHOR OF THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE
Praise for While You Were Gone 2019 IPPY Silver Medal Winner:
“While You Were Gone is an open-hearted and complex story of an amazing family, told with such confidence that I could not put it down. Sybil Baker has the enviable ability to populate her work with characters who feel so nuanced and real that you can’t believe that you haven’t always known these people, that they haven’t always been a part of your life. And when I finished this beautiful story, I found myself unable to forget them.”
-KEVIN WILSON, AUTHOR AND NOTHING TO SEE HERE AND NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC
“With echoes of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Baker’s novel deftly mines the personal histories of Claire, the eldest, followed by Shannon and then Paige, as they grow from gangly adolescents in 1995 to morally conflicted women in 2011, spinning away from and back to the city that both buoys them and sucks them down into its vortex of social and racial tensions.”
–HAMILTON CAIN FOR CHAPTER 16
Praise for Immigration Essays:
“Any reader attracted to the essays of a big-hearted, fearless, vagabond-worthy writer will absolutely love Sybil Baker’s essay collection Immigration Essays. It’s like taking a great tour without all of the irritations of travel. this is one splendid, fun reading experience.”
-GEORGE SINGLETON, AUTHOR OF CALLOUSTOWN
“Travel can be a luxury, a diversion, an obsession, a necessity, or a means of survival. In Sybil Baker’s Immigration Essays, it’s all those things, as well as a kind of existential meditation–movement as a way of being in the world. In the thirteen pieces that make up this slim collection, Baker places accounts of her own relatively privileged experience of travel alongside stories of less comfortable wanderers, including international refugees.”
Sybil Baker 