Debut Novel
Brooklyn, 1998. Serenity Marcelin and her six-year-old daughter, Jouvay, have spent the summer reeling from an unexpected, devastating loss. Just when the two of them are beginning to find solace within their new family dynamic, Jouvay disappears into a crowd over Labor Day weekend and Serenity’s entire world changes in an instant.
In order to understand the events leading to Jouvay’s sudden disappearance, Serenity must unearth the long-buried secrets—and ghosts—of her family’s shocking past.
Told through the eyes of the unforgettable Marcelin women and the people closest to them, Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili's Backstitch embroiders a profound tale of hope and resistance, maneuvering readers from the city of Jérémie during the years of the US occupation of Haiti to the vibrant streets of New York. A sweeping story of motherhood, sisterhood, resistance, generational trauma, and liberation, this novel charts the lives of the ghosts, secrets, and languages we can’t escape from—even when we try to bury them.
Flatiron Books (US) · February 23, 2027 Mantle (UK) · February 25, 2027
About the Author
Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili is a Haitian-American, Jamaican-Canadian writer, poet, and essayist. She is the recipient of the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Award and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, as well as co-editor of BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books).
Her work has most recently appeared in Adi Magazine, Vogue, LitHub, WIRED Magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, Fourteen Hills Press, Room Magazine, Adirondack Review, and O: The Oprah Magazine.
She holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is the curator of Brunch & Word, a bi-coastal literary salon.
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