About the Author

Author photo provided by Yung Chen @airinyung

Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, matchbook, The Citron Review, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. CALL MY BODY A CAUTIONARY TALE is her debut collection of flash fiction. Connect with her on Instagram @christinaltudor or at www.christinatudor.com

Reviews

“The stories in Christina Tudor’s Call My Body a Cautionary Tale conjure women’s bodies as liminal spaces. In one story, a girl’s body is made up of fragments, filled in with parts of her mother; in another, a girl has an unasked-for extra limb. Never whole, the body becomes a site of negotiation, leading to the questions: Why does a woman not fully own her body, and why do others feel they can lay claim to it—whether it be a man waiting around the corner on a dark street, a man outside an abortion clinic, or a mother who feels her daughter should be grateful for the gift of her body? There are also stories featuring ghosts of girls and women. The last story in the collection, “What You Leave Behind,” is a breathtaking tale of a ghost woman able to return home for just 15 minutes to move through the rooms, feel everything, and remember the lived, mostly ordinary moments there, where her “body was a vessel for others.” Do not miss this wonderful collection!”

 —Cheryl Pappas, author of The Clarity of Hunger

“Christina Tudor’s debut collection Call My Body a Cautionary Tale is jarring and beautiful, comprised of short flash pieces that straddle genre and expectation. With dark flashes of humor and bold vulnerability, this collection will lead you down the most unexpected of paths. And what a gift! By the last page, you’ll find yourself re-examining your own ideas about identity, family, and the life you choose to live.”

 —Hannah Grieco, author of First Kicking, Then Not

“In Call My Body a Cautionary Tale, Christina Tudor hits it out of the park again and again with eighteen tightly woven, thematically linked stories. These tales build, accrue, and make their mark on both heart and mind. The collection as a whole interrogates girlhood and womanhood and what it means to inhabit bodies that society sees as lessons, warnings, mistakes, and temptations. The opening story, “I Was Born a Half-Formed Thing,” exemplifies Tudor’s daring: “My whole self fit in my mother’s palm. To save me, she fashioned me from herself.” All through this collection, I marveled at the depth and imagination she brings to her stories. Another favorite, “The Girl with the Third Leg,” portrays a young girl who is simultaneously gawked at and admired. A story that could so easily be mawkish or ham-fisted is instead emotionally complex and keenly perceptive, with a subtle underlying message. This is Tudor’s strength as both a thinker and a storyteller. While reminiscent of the work of Carmen Maria Machado, this collection comes to us from a writer of inimitable voice and vision. A must-read.”

 —Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

“The stories of Call My Body a Cautionary Tale blend the fabulist with the achingly familiar, the absurd with the all-too-real. With humor, urgency, and sparkling imagination, Tudor introduces us to mothers, daughters, mermaids, and monsters as they contend with the wondrous possibilities and crushing limitations of the corporeal form. Fans of Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, and Gwen E. Kirby will find much to love in these small, tall tales.”

 —Kristina Ten, author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine