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Angélique Jamail’s Animal Affinities Series Wins Three Firebird Awards
by Writing Workshops Staff
15 minutes ago
“I’ve been teaching Creative Writing for over 30 years and can easily lose sight of how special it is to feel vulnerable and also supported in the subject.”
Angélique Jamail
In the world of Angélique Jamail’s Animal Affinities books, growing up means finding out which animal lives inside you. Some people find out early. In Stray, the boy next door emerges as a wolf in seventh grade and becomes a high school football star. Raqia, who came to Texas from Lebanon as a toddler with her grandmother to escape the wolf packs terrorizing their home, is still waiting. Everyone tells her an Affinity can arrive late. Nobody quite sounds convinced.
This month, that girl who is still waiting won two awards. Stray took Best Magical Realism and Best Multicultural Fiction in the Firebird International Book Awards, and A Narrowing Path, the novella that opened the series, won Best Novella. Three wins for the first two books of a planned trilogy. Angélique announced the news on her blog with genuine surprise, noting that her publisher sends her books out to contests and she has never expected to win any of them.
She is a Lebanese-American writer whose poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Synkroniciti, Waxwing, Femmeliterate, Literary Mama, and many others. Her poetry collection, The Sharp Edges of Water, moves between Houston and Los Angeles and sometimes slips into magic realism on the way. She serves on the board of Mutabilis Press, directs a creative writing program, belongs to SFWA, and has kept her blog, Sappho’s Torque, going for well over a decade.
She has also taught Creative Writing for more than thirty years, which is exactly why she keeps signing up for classes. Workshops let her be a student again, handed a prompt and a new angle by someone else. Her explanation is short. “Generative workshops always fill my well.”
Her first class with us, in October 2023, was Amber Sparks’ The Modern Gothic: Making Haunted Fictions for the 21st Century. The seminar asks how a writer can use the machinery Henry James and Shirley Jackson made standard and still produce something that feels new, reading contemporary ghost stories by Brian Evenson and Carmen Maria Machado along the way, and everyone leaves with a gothic draft of their own. It’s a useful frame for a writer whose books find the uncanny inside the ordinary.
In February 2026, the year Stray came out, she took Courtney Kocak’s Start a Newsletter to Supercharge Your Platform, Network and Business. And on October 3, two weeks before the Firebird news arrived, she sat in on Caitlin Kunkel’s Write Like an Athlete, where a former competitive distance swimmer borrows from sports psychology: self-talk, warm-up routines, practical goals, and social accountability. That last one is already Angélique’s secret weapon. When the writing gets hard, she leans on consistent practice and accountability partners. Asked to sum up the change in her writing life, she gave two words: once disorganized, now focused.
The awards matter for what they recognize. Stray, published by Memento Vivere Press, an independent press in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a coming-of-age novel about a Lebanese-American teenager in Houston whose old fear has followed her across an ocean. The wolf packs she left in Beirut start turning up in the local news just as homecoming approaches, and her closest friendships start to come apart. Best Magical Realism and Best Multicultural Fiction, given to the same book, describe exactly what it does. The series as a whole is about being Plain in a world that sorts people by what they become, and about how cruel the people who sort can be.
We asked what she would tell a writer who is on the fence about taking a class. Her answer was practical, the way a teacher’s often is: “Find something being taught in a subject you’re really interested in. There’s usually a low time commitment for the potential reward involved.”
Right now she is writing the third Animal Affinities book. She is excited about it, and she admits the awards have added a little pressure. In the post announcing them, she gave herself a few lines to celebrate, made a joke about the weight now resting on book three, and then signed off to go write it. You can follow along at angeliquejamail.com.
Angélique found us the way a lot of working writers do: one focused seminar at a time, picked because the subject pulled at her. Our live online classes are taught by working writers, run for a few hours or a few weeks, and are recorded if you can’t make it live. Find one that fits what you’re writing now.
