His story What Remains was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Rum Punch Press. His short stories and essays have appeared in several journals, most recently in The Columbia Review, Gone Lawn, and The Legendary. She wants answers, but to find them, she risks destroying her closest relationships. An award-winning author, and scholar, Ciahnan’s first book was the award-winning A Lifetime of Men. A writer and scholar, Ciahnan Darrell holds Masters degrees from the University of Chicago and Stony Brook University, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Buffalo, where his research focused on radicalized and gendered violence in Southern African Literature. Almost overnight, everything Tolan thought she knew about herself and her family has changed. Her mother told her he died years ago, but the book suggests their story had a different ending. He splits his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, where his family has resided for more than a century. In addition to writing, Ciahnan is a husband, a father, a cook, an oenophile, a matero, a gym-goer, and a runner. Tolan is pretty sure that Michael is her father. His first novel, A Lifetime of Men, was released by Propertius Press in the fall of 2020. They bond over their shared outcast status, and their friendship quickly becomes intimate, but the relationship antagonizes the self-appointed moral watchdogs in their small town, who start to convert their threats into action. College student Christopher Fairchild, the son of a white billionaire, disappears, and is next seen being savagely tortured in a video that surfaces online. She's more clear about the relationship between her mother and Michael, a man twelve years her senior. Her mother appears to be associated with Bo, a feisty photojournalist who flies to Cuba in pursuit of a story and becomes embedded with Castro's rebels, but Tolan can't quite work out their connection. She's hoping for answers, but instead, she finds more mysteries tucked away in her mother's past. But when she finds a manuscript on her mother's computer that promises to reveal the true story, Tolan only hesitates for a moment before curiosity compels her to read on. Tolan has always let her mother have one secret - how she got that scar on her face - playing along with her mother's game of inventing outlandish tales to explain the wound away.

A Lifetime of Men by Ciahnan Darrell