At-Risk, by Amina Gautier

The African-American children and teens in these potent stories are all at risk all of the time. Most readers who pick up this book already know about the dangers that these youths face as residents of a Brooklyn housing project: drug addiction and trafficking, gun violence and teen pregnancy. But most don’t know what it’s like to be them, to live minute to minute and day to day in a perilous setting. How do these youth find friends? How do they see their own neighborhoods and understand themselves in their setting? How are they pulled under from safety and innocence into the dangers that tug at them?

The power of these stories is in the way they portray that undertow. Amina Gautier pulls us inside the characters’ lives so we learn—she said in an interview with Pif magazine—“what they don’t want anyone else to know about them.” The characters include a teenager who’s afraid of his peers’ bullying, a restless teen mom who just wants to be a teen, a young man who knows that his friends will get him in trouble but who needs their companionship.

Gautier grew up in Brooklyn, in the 1980s and ’90s, and she plumbs her experiences in these stories, taking readers with her into the unnerving tension of lives caught between internal turmoil and the culture’s outside dangers. Now she lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University. Her stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Ken­yon Review and other literary magazines. At-Risk, her first collection of stories, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.