2018 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Kanika Agrawal.
Chosen by Solmaz Sharif for the inaugural Oversound Chapbook Prize, Kanika Agrawal’s Okazaki Fragments adapts concepts, images and language from a series of scientific papers published in the 1960s and ’70s. The series, Mechanism of DNA Chain Growth, presents research on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication. The research was led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. Okazaki Fragments (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their papers.
About the author:
Kanika Agrawal is a hybrid specimen raised in six countries on four continents. She studied biology at MIT, where she came to love restriction enzymes and fluorescent labeling. She received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, SAND, and various SF&F publications.