“Who are we to each other when we’re afraid?” Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel asks in this moving and original debut essay collection. Her answer is a lyric examination of the icons that summon and soothe our fears. From Donald Trump to the Virgin Mary, Darth Vader to the Dalai Lama, Schlegel turns cultural criticism personal with bracing intelligence and vulnerability. Each essay is woven through with other voices [Baldwin, Auden, Du Bois, Cixous] positioning Schlegel's arguments and meditations within a diverse and dynamic literary lineage. 

Fear Icons is a vital and timely inquiry into the complex relationship between love and fear—and the ways that each intensifies the other.

Read an essay from Fear Icons

“Liberace and the Ash Tree”

“Darth Vader”

Reviews

Publisher’s Weekly

Brevity

Punctuate

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel is the author of Fear Icons, winner of the inaugural Gournay Prize from The Ohio State University Press.

She has published prose in Shirley Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice reporting and many grants and fellowships. A graduate of the University of Montana's Environmental Studies Program and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, she is an Associate Professor of English at Whitman College.

Interview with LARB

Interview with THE WRITE QUESTION

Fiction

• "Carry the Forest Home," Shirley Magazine, 2018