Brenda Peynado is a Dominican American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Sun, Revizyon Sid la, la Revizyon Kenyon, The Threepenny Review, Charyo Preri, and more than 40 other journals. Her first book, The Rock Eaters: Stories (Penguin Books), is threaded with magic. The collection explores what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In them, suburban families perform oblations to cattle-like angels who live on their roofs, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing, and an old woman disappears completely among the objects she has hoarded. Jounal Washington Post called it a “genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”