Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Biography

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a VQR columnist. His work has appeared in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, the Bitter Southerner, LitHub, Pacific Standard, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the winner of the Iowa Review Fiction Award, the Soto Speak Journal Short Story Award, and the William Faulkner Competition for Novel in Progress. His first novel, We Cast A Shadow (Random House, 2019), is forthcoming. 

See Work

CRITICISM / Winter 2019

Family Matters

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

On Mother’s Day 2019, I take Mama to the home of her best childhood friend for dinner. Her friend’s family includes a sister, a brother, her friend’s father (still grinning in his midnineties), and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins...
CRITICISM / Winter 2018

Killing Ourselves Softly

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

At a writing conference several years ago, I had gone straight from the airport to a reception held by an organization that had given me a prize the previous year. The event was in the side room of a restaurant and there was cake. I love...
CRITICISM / Fall 2018

Returning the Gaze

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the recent Women’s Marches is not that they have become an annual event, or that these marches sprung forth all over the globe from Washington, D.C. to Paradise Bay, Antarctica. No, if an alarm should...
CRITICISM / Summer 2018

Personal Terrors

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

The first time a police officer runs his hand up the secret space between my legs, I’m sixteen. I’ve just walked out of a dance. I’m not drunk. In fact, with one exception, I won’t even have a glass of wine until my midtwenties. I’m not...
ESSAYS / Fall 2016

Fine Dining

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Encountering New Orleans’s Racial Undertones One Meal at a Time