Emma Copley Eisenberg / Photo by Keith Alan Sprouse.

The short story “44 True Things About Being Gone,” written by Emma Copley Eisenberg while she lived on 45th and Springfield in 2011, was chosen by writer Maile Meloy as the winner of the 2013 Montana Prize in Fiction and appears in the current issue of CutBank Literary Magazine. The story is set in West Philadelphia and features a friendship between a young, queer, white woman from West Virginia who works at a coffee shop in Center City and a young black male PhD candidate who’s recently left a Rastafarian community in Germantown.

The Baltimore Avenue corridor features prominently as well as other notable Philadelphia locales, and the piece benefited from feedback from the members of local Kelly Writers House-affiliated Backyard Writers club. Eisenberg says, “West Philadelphia is essential to this story. I wanted to highlight the connections and friendships I saw springing up in the neighborhood that crossed lines of geography and class and sexuality and race. People living in close proximity make these relationships more likely, but there is something about West Philadelphia that makes them magic.”

By the way, Eisenberg also contributed to West Philly Local while she lived in West Philly.

To read the story, click on the link below.

http://www.cutbankonline.org/cutbank-79-44-true-things-about-being-gone/