Set in the lushness of Cuba and Florida, and spanning decades, the stories in Dressing the Saints chronicle lives left behind and new ones forged with struggle, melancholy, and hope.

Tombolo Books welcomes local author Aracelis González Asendorf to the bookstore for a celebration of her latest story collection, Dressing the Saints.

Asendorf will be joined in conversation by fellow local author of Brujas, Lorraine Monteagut.

Let us know we will see you there. Please RSVP!

In Dressing the Saints, old loves are reencountered, enemies confronted, family secrets are revealed, and women fight for agency. Memory, what can’t be forgotten and what is elusively fading away with the passage of time, is ever-present in the stories of people fiercely confronting fate with grace and compassion.

An unforgettable collection about home, endurance, and the search for understanding amid often devastating losses. I fell in love with these characters as they tried to connect with one another, sometimes tenderly, sometimes awkwardly, and sometimes proudly displaying well-earned fangs. A gorgeous, lyrical debut!
—Ana Menéndez, author of The Apartment

Aracelis González Asendorf was born in Cuba. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Brevity Magazine, Kweli Journal, Aster(ix) Journal, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, The South Atlantic Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in 100% Pure Florida Fiction (University of Florida Press, 2000), All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press, 2021). She is the recipient of the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Graduate Creative Writing Award for Prose, and a 2019 Sterling Watson Fellow. She lives in Tampa, Florida.

Lorraine Monteagut is a Cuban-Colombian writer born in Miami, Florida. She holds a PhD in communication from the University of South Florida, where she began her research on bruja feminism and the reclamation of ancestral healing traditions. Inspired to the spiritual life by her great grandmother, who was an espiritista in Cuba, she facilitates astrology workshops and moon circles in her local community in Tampa, Florida. She loves hiking, gardening, and backyard beekeeping.