When writer David Wright Faladé ’86 senses the stars are aligned in an advantageous constellation, he habitually raps the nearest solid surface. “Knock on wood,” he’ll say with a knowing nod. Over the past 18 months, the 58-year-old writer has found plenty of reasons to perform the pantomime.
He’s had three pieces (a short story and two nonfiction essays) published in the New Yorker. The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers named him a 2021–22 fellow. His second novel, Black Cloud Rising—a truth-inspired tale that follows a Union Army Black brigade in the final days of the Civil War—was published by Grove Atlantic and featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition. And the New York Times dubbed the effort a “rousing … straight-up page-turner.” (There was also an on-camera interview with ESPN and a last-minute invitation to attend the 2022 PEN America Literary Gala. But we digress…)
A professor of English at the University of Illinois, Faladé says the roller coaster began climbing in late 2019, when he began searching for a new agent. After his 150th rejection letter, he started to wonder if Black Cloud Rising was destined for a small press. After getting contact information for legendary William Morris agent Eric Simonoff, however, he decided to send out one last query. It proved worth the postage.
Simonoff initially struggled to find a publisher for his new client, so he and Faladé agreed to pitch a version of the book’s first chapter to the New Yorker. At the same time, Faladé sent an unrelated essay inspired by George Floyd’s murder (reprinted in the Voice, Fall 2020) to the Texas Standard, a nationally broadcast public radio show. Within days, both pieces—which grapple with racial identity and Americanness—were green-lit and, in Faladé’s telling, “the energy around everything changed.”
“The lesson I take away—the lesson I share with all my students—is that you must be relentlessly stubborn and be ready for when the stars align,” says Faladé, who also served as guest editor for the Voice’s award-winning summer fiction issue in 2021. “They don’t always align, of course. And that’s the tough part of this business. But I know this for sure: if you don’t work hard and you’re not ready, they never will.”