
“Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection.” —Kirkus Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena’s stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth. Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language’s ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.
Author
My essays have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, WSQ, and anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017). My fiction has been anthologized recently in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and named a notable story by Best American Short Stories in 2011 and 2012. I have received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and am a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. I am currently an associate fiction editor at West Branch literary magazine and visiting fiction faculty at the MFA Program in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I am currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, an associate fiction editor at West Branch, and visiting faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. My short story collection The Other One was the winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and was released in 2016. My essay collection Dark Tourist won the 2020 Gournay Prize and will be released in December 2021 by Mad Creek/Ohio State University Press. I use they/them/their/she/her/hers pronouns.