“So you see, saving the world is an innocent matter,” Molly thought to herself. “Let’s leave it in the hands of the hungry children.”

Bio

Raluca Comanelea is a woman writer from Brasov, Romania, creating words and teaching from Las Vegas, Nevada. Raluca’s fiction has been featured in STORGY Magazine, Reflex Fiction, Toho Journal, Secret Attic, and Little Somethings Press, among other literary venues. Her short story, “A Glass of Fresh, Clean Water from Lake Baikal,” has won the first place prize in Twist and Twain’s Short Story Contest 2020-2021.

Raluca’s fiction chapbook, The Art of Surviving in a Glass of Water, was a finalist for Newfound Prose Prize 2021. This same manuscript has been longlisted for C & R Press Summer Tide Pool 2020 Chapbook Awards and for Thirty West Publishing House’s Wavelengths Chapbook Contest 2022. Raluca has been awarded a finalist prize for her collection of short stories celebrating women, A General History of the Feminine Brain, by Eyelands Book Awards 2022. Her fiction novella, “The Museum of Our Realities,” has won the finalist title with Eyelands Book Awards 2021 and has been shortlisted in the Reflex Press Novella Award 2021.

Raluca’s academic work, centered on Tennessee Williams’s female characters and their theatricality, has been featured in Popular Culture Review and in The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (RMMLA). Raluca is an active participant in RMMLA’s conferences, as chair and panelist for the academic session  on Hemingway and the creative session on English prose.

Raluca holds an MA in Literary Studies (awarded in 2019) from UNLV, where she currently teaches English Composition courses. She is an MFA student at Spalding University in Kentucky, Louisville, her concentration being fiction.

Find Raluca on Twitter (@RComanelea),  on Facebook (Raluca Comanelea) and on Instagram.

Raluca Comanelea

Writer

With a fountain pen by my side, I sketch recollections, scraps of fleeting life episodes which provoke tiny revelations. A story is that big! A deep world resting at the fingertips of the reader.

About me

I am a woman born in Romania, a writer residing in Las Vegas, but also a teacher, a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a friend. I am all these, and more. At times, I am the best I can be. Other times, I am not. But writing has empowered me to become everything I ever dreamed to be, in single shooting moments.

The surrounding world we inhabit is a stage, and we should reenact as many roles as we can in the course of our lifetime, so that we gain intimate knowledge of ourselves. With multiple layers of our personalities peeled off, human drama moves from the realm of the theatrical to flesh-and-blood exposition.

I am often remembered in a gipsy-style blouse, a faded-red skirt, a pair of vintage boots on my feet, wearing my hair clips as a work of art, always holding on to that fountain pen and notebook purchased by a lost friend from the streets of Camden Town.

I am an eternal lover of calligraphy and coffee, of dialogues blooming in the month of July, of farm animals, of trial and error. The smell of rare books brings my mother’s scent back into my nostrils.

At times, I shed tears at the thought of how many ants my tiny feet have squashed through the years. How misunderstood we all are in our daily actions. It is universal hope that washes off our collective guilt. I believe in colors, in healing, in home, in children, in books, in cats, in the smooth and subtle power of a fountain pen on white paper. I believe in you, my dear reader and most intimate friend through this journey of creation.

The whole universe nests in my heart. And in yours.

Publications

Literary Reviews

 Translations & Editing Work

Events and Awards

Blog

Push, Woman!

A woman’s push is the supreme act of creation. Patriarchy has attempted since time immemorial to debilitate the fascinating power of this push which belongs entirely to the feminine realm.…

The Other

We live in a constant state of fear and pointing fingers while the regime lives its most intense orgasm of all times. We find ourselves in a state of constant…

A most graceful exit for Blanche

She is alive. They tried to bury her but she is alive. She doesn’t want to be buried. Not the way they want her to. Moon rays shoot through her window and she waits. She waits…

Everything Went Dark

I Then I Saw Her It is not the Darkness which brought me to the roadside sandwich joint, But my sense of humor. Maybe my future starts right now, said…

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 Always grateful for a question, a comment, a critique, or an applause.

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