Mist: A Novel

It is 2019 and Josefina Pujols, an overachieving professor going up for tenure at Tanner University (“The Ninth Ivy”), watches in dismay as social media popularity threatens to take over the academic standards she had been rigorously trained to uphold. Online shopping, group chat, and an alcohol problem palliate her encounters with an inbox full of increasingly ludicrous requests from her colleagues.

When Doralis Montero, who had mysteriously quit her prestigious professorship two years earlier, reaches out and explains the sinister reasons behind her disappearance, Jo leaps into a research rabbit hole teeming with South American Nazi villages, disturbing dance rituals, and racial impostors. Despite the life-threatening risks inherent to this research project, Jo glows with newfound purpose.

Mist takes us from present-day Connecticut and the Dominican Republic to 1930s Paris, Harlem, and the mountains of Haiti, Bolivia, and Austria. The story braids two timelines and the narrative voices of generations of Black women, their friends, and a resistance movement that has for millennia tried to defeat the god-like AI beings ruling from the depths of the planet.