2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Awardee Anndee Hochman "wants readers to come away feeling more connected and less alone"

2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Awardee Feature of the Week:

Anndee Hochman, My Plural Is People (Young Adult Novel)

In My Plural is People, teenagers Zach and Khady, best friends since pre-school, embark on an impulsive winter-break quest to learn the truth about both their families.

Anndee’s novel unfolds through the voices of three characters: teenagers Zach and Khady, along with Khady’s grandmother, Delores, who tells her story in reverse chronology. Part road-trip, part deep-dive into family myth and mystery, The book asks: Is it our history, our genes or our choices that make us who we are?

The grant, propitiously timed, allowed Anndee to have a DIY writing retreat in New York in June, where she plunged into draft #5 of My Plural Is People, listening deeply to the characters’ voices, expanding some key moments in the story while paring back the weedy places.

“I want readers to come away feeling more connected and less alone, no matter their history, their identity or the secrets their families hold.

All writers have their obsessions. Mine is family, a theme that has fueled my work since my first book, Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community & Home (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994) and continued to ripple through my second, Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA, 2000). My YA novel-in-progress, My Plural Is People, pokes at questions of kinship, connection and identity through the experience of two teens (and a grandmother) whose families flout conventional norms.”

2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Awardee Anndee Hochman “wants readers to come away feeling more connected and less alone”

2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Awardee Feature of the Week:

Anndee Hochman, My Plural Is People (Young Adult Novel)

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