'Sister Creatures' by Laura Venita Green '22 Out in October

Sister Creatures, a debut novel by Writing alum Laura Venita Green '22, will be published October 7, 2025 from Unnamed Press. The story takes place in a southern Louisiana town and follows the events that unfold after Tess Lavigne, a college dropout-turned babysitter, is approached by a girl known as Sister Gail who emerges from the woods behind the house of the children she’s been hired to watch. Sister Gail, daughter of religious fundamentalists, convinces Tess to take her in for the night, which changes the course of Tess’s future and determines Sister Gail’s fate. Sister Creatures has been named an Indie Pick of October 2025.

"I’m enjoying my experience as a debut novelist," said Green, "getting a glimpse of the fairly opaque publishing industry. I’m surprised, though, at how being an author is very different from being a writer. Being a writer is about the art, sitting at your desk, alone, trying to create something great. Being an author is largely about promotion: events, social media, interviews, podcasts, and building a network. It’s actually a lot of fun, but it makes me grateful that Columbia focused almost solely on the art."

Fellow Writing alum and author of I Leave It Up to You Jinwoo Chong '21 wrote, "Captivating and sublime, Laura Venita Green’s Sister Creatures weaves together a series of hauntings: of the past, of the home and family, of the secrets kept inside that threaten an ever-delicate peace. Set at first within an uncanny reflection of Green’s native Louisiana and centered on a cast of women bound to their roots in unexpected ways, this is a book that interchanges the tender and the cruel, the weird and the real, with breathtaking ease." 

"Sister Creatures wouldn’t have been possible without Columbia,” said Green. "I wanted to write about rural Louisiana, where I grew up—about the place and the people—but it took working intensely with my professors and classmates to figure out how to tell the story dynamically, in a way I felt proud of."

Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, was a finalist for the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and appears in Story, Joyland, The Missouri Review, and Fatal Flaw. Her translations appear in Asymptote, World Literature Today, Spazinclusi, and The Apple Valley Review. Raised in rural Louisiana, Laura now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her first novel.