Sumanth Prabhaker was named our featured author this month for his short story "A Hard Truth About Waste Management."
Sumanth Prabhaker is 23 years old and lives in Wilmington, North Carolina with his wife, Emily. He’s currently studying for an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and working as the designer and fiction editor for Ecotone, UNCW’s literary journal. Before that, he worked as a caregiver for adults with developmental disabilities at a not-for-profit organization called Little Friends, Inc. Before that, he attended school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Before that, he was very little, and his parents would position him near a portable Sony cassette player while they spoon-fed him. This was in New York. The player was black and silver and had dents all over its case, which was the sort of plastic composite that retains the oils from grubby fingerprints for months. It had a handle that could tuck neatly inside, and a firm stainless steel sheet over the speaker. Sumanth loved this cassette player, especially when it read to him. His parents recall it fondly as well, in particular one incident in which Sumanth memorized the spoken words to a Curious George story he owned both the book and tapes of and made a big show of reciting it tapeless from his high chair, turning the pages at all the right times and inflecting as the narrator had, as if he had decided suddenly to become literate. For a few minutes, everybody believed him. He was probably 2 years old at the time, but that sentiment seems to have governed pretty much everything he’s done since.
He recently completed a collection of stories called Village of Cults, from which "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" was taken. Others in that collection involve a man who lives on the clouds, a fetus who grows up inside his mother’s uterus, a city run by the Church of Scientology, and a dying whale. He is presently at work on a superhero novel and a screenplay for an almost silent film.
Sumanth can be reached at suprabhaker@yahoo.com.
Other publications online:
www.newpantagruel.com/issues/1.3/acronym_titlespiritual_recu.php