A charged collection drawn from the Liminal x Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize longlist, gathering First Nations writers and writers of colour who refuse inherited frames.

These essays circle questions most national literatures prefer to smooth over: how do we hold our former selves without flattening them? What does ancestry demand of the present? How do you write toward futures when the past has been misfiled, diminished, or deliberately erased?

Across pieces that move from trans becoming to statelessness, from contested memory to layered inheritances of land, language and politics, the collection unsettles any single story of where we’ve come from. It is testimony, but also rehearsal — a drafting of other possible futures.

Contributors include Andre Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie.