Tara Stillions Whitehead

Writer, Filmmaker, Educator

Image is of a red book cover with white text that reads They More Than Burned/ Tara Stillions Whitehead. The right side of the cover has a film strip with black and white film stills on it.

PREORDER BOOK HERE

Coming from Unsolicited Press January 26, 2027

In her second full-length book, They More Than Burned, Tara Stillions Whitehead explores the unstable space where lived experience becomes story. Using screenplay fragments, imagined interviews, speculative fiction, and fractured recollection, Tara Stillions Whitehead builds a metaphorical archive of grief, addiction, displacement, recovery, and post-9/11 disillusionment.

Part literary experiment, part cultural reckoning, They More Than Burned is a feminist protest against the Hollywoodization of lived experience and the assumption that survival must become inspiration to have value. The book asks who controls narrative authority, what gets cut when a life is edited for consumption, and whether telling the truth sometimes requires refusing the shape a story is expected to take.

Praise For They More Than Burned

“They More Than Burned is an incendiary archive: a collection of jagged memories that tumble and catch one another in the light, an unwinding a spool of film on fire. Whitehead narrates the fire of a burning world—Southern California wildfires, the burning of the Twin Towers, a house set ablaze and filmed—but the real fire in question throughout this book is the passion of this woman who, at sixteen, began to film a generation as it emerged in the shadow of these fires, a product of the gritty Southern California reality where parents are in prison, boys go from being anarchists to soldiers overnight, and going back to the beginning is painful because that’s when everyone was still alive. Southern California’s Gogol, Whitehead records the diary of not a madwoman, but a woman made mad. Watch as Whitehead burns it down, and rejoice at the power of her will and the power of her words.”

Katie Farris, acclaimed author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive

“Whitehead writes with pain—fed by pain—to gather a sense of clarity, and in this clearing, there is a gleam. She paved no roads for us to follow for this amazingly unique array of words leave no traces—just ghostly memories inserted into the spectrums of time.”

Shome Dasgupta, author of The Seagull and the Urn

“In brief essays, vignettes, and large chunks of screenplay and erasure, Stillions Whitehead manages to capture the pressing present anxieties of recovery, motherhood, career and momentum, while creating a flashing reel of the past that is too recognizable, too painful, searing and yet invites a warm return.”

Shannon Wolf, author of Green Card Girl

Also Published by Unsolicited Press


Unsolicited Press, 2022
2022 Aspen Words Prize Nominee
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PRAISE FOR THE YEAR OF THE MONSTER

“The stories in The Year of the Monster are tender, truthful, fiery and finely wrought. Tara Stillions Whitehead has built a collection that leaves little doubt as to her range and mastery as a storyteller. This book could be studied at the level of language alone as her sentences are both elegant and exacting. The people who inhabit these stories have been through some things and there are no easy answers, but let this book serve as a short course in self-acceptance, grit, honesty, and survival. I’m in awe of Whitehead’s intelligence and heart, fully on display in these pages. I know she has many more books ahead of her. I can’t wait to read every one of them.”

Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

“If you mix a cocktail of Octavia Butler, Mary Robison, and early Jayne Anne Phillips, you might get something approaching Tara Stillions Whitehead’s style. Yet her style is highly original and all her own:  shape-shifting and subtle.  Her language packs real power. The stories in The Year of the Monster deal with love and unlove, math and physics, deception, truth, and loss – – both personal and cultural.  As they navigate life’s obstacles – both spiritual and societal — her characters show resilience and stamina even when darkness looms. ‘God and Laundry’ is one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. But read them all, every story – from cover to cover. The entire collection sparkles.”

Larry Fondation, Martyrs and Holymen

Events, & Readings

2026 – 2027 Events coming soon!

4.27.23 – @7pm – San Diego Literary Festival – Featured Writer – Grossmont College
San Diego, CA

6.10.23 – @1pm – The Writer’s Center – Reading and Q & A – in person
Bethesda, MD

7.7.23 – @7pm – Author reading and signing (w/Monica Prince) at Midtown Scholar
Harrisburg, PA

9.30.23 – @ Berry College – Reading and Q & A in-person
Rome, GA

10.21.24 – @7pm – Writer-in-residence reading and Q&A
Lebanon Valley College, PA

Listed as a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2022 anthology edited by Alexander Chee, “The Mother Must Die and Other Lies Fairy Tales Told Me,” a hybrid essay about Anne Sexton, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cinderella, and motherhood/addiction, published in the Gold Issue of Fairy Tale Review was also nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize!

Sincere thanks to the editors at Porcupine Literary Journal for nominating “A Lesson on Endings” for both a 2022 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net!

12.3.2021 – New interview about Blood Histories, fairy tales, creative nonfiction, and recovery, up at Fractured Lit: “Omission Serves a Purpose: An Interview with Tara Stillions Whitehead.”

Wiggie! Wiggie! Wiggie!

“Seven Bodies I Didn’t Leave Behind,” originally published in HAD (Hobart), selected for Wigleaf Top 50 2021 by Molly Gaudry!

Huge thanks to the series and selecting editors at Wigleaf!

“Flashover,” originally published in Still: The Journal, was selected by Kathy Fish for inlclusion in the Wigleaf Top 50 2022!