NEW BOOK RELEASE
The Island of Ghost Ships
Paper / Essays
Pre-order until July 10, 2026
Release Date: August 28, 2026
When Jamy Bond’s younger sister, Shelby, followed in her footsteps and joined the Peace Corps, it should have been a shared legacy of service. Instead, Shelby is killed in a violent car crash in South Africa, and Jamy is left devastated and desperate to understand her sister’s final moments. In The Island of Ghost Ships, Jamy Bond navigates the wreckage of grief through a series of short essays and a central haunting narrative. Part memoir, part investigative journey, this collection follows Bond as she travels to southern Africa and locates Shelby’s boyfriend, Idasse, who survived the crash. Together they retrace Shelby’s steps across a landscape of memory and loss. Through lyrical prose that is honest and tender, this collection is a powerful meditation on the bonds of sisterhood and the courageous search for light from the depths of darkness.
Jamy Bond is an American prose writer. Her debut chapbook Combat Zones won the 2025 Boudin Flash Fiction Chapbook Contest judged by Roxane Gay and was published in March 2026. Her hybrid chapbook, The Island of Ghost Ships, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her stories and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in Best Microfiction 2023, The Sun Magazine, The Rumpus, and Wigleaf. She earned a BA in Philosophy and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from George Mason University where she co-founded So To Speak Journal. She lives with her family near Washington, DC. @jamy.bond www.jamybond.com
PRAISE:
“This beautiful work is both an elegy, and a remembrance, and it has the power of a brilliant and sorrowful poem. It will lift you up, as art does, while it brings tears.”
– Richard Bausch, author, most recently, of The Fate of Others: Stories
In her debut chapbook, The Island of Ghost Ships, Jamy Bond bravely explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: the loss of a person we simply can’t live without. The vulnerable, shimmering stories in this small but mighty collection are crafted of beautiful sentences and delivered with a glass blower’s precision. While survivor’s grief and loneliness define these pieces, there are many moments of tenderness, joy and love. This is an extraordinary debut, full of emotional truth— the work of a new short form master.
– Meg Pokrass, author, most recently, of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories
In The Island of Ghost Ships, loss becomes both wound and witness. With the stark beauty of Louise Glück and the quiet radiance of Ocean Vuong, this chapbook lingers where grief and love are inseparable, asking what it means to hold on even as we let go. To read Jamy Bond’s debut chapbook is to walk with an incredible writer through the tender terrain of death and discover, among its ruins, elegy as a fragile kind of grace. At once intimate and expansive, this collection is not only a testament to a singular sisterly bond but also an offering to anyone who has stood at the threshold of sorrow and searched for light.
– Melissa Scholes Young, author of Flood and The Hive
NEW RELEASE: COMBAT ZONES BY JAMY BOND
Winner of the Boudin Flash Fiction Chapbook Contest, judged by Roxane Gay
“As is the case with the best of flash fiction, Jamy Bond conjures richly detailed worlds with a deft economy of language. These are stories about the sweet, sticky, sometimes bitter mess of girlhood, the unexpected challenges of adulthood, the ways of men, and the atmospheric nostalgia of jumping into the known unknown of a quarry. Combat Zones is an unforgettable collection of stories from an immensely talented writer.”
— Roxane Gay, Contest Judge
Watch The Trailer Below
Surviving the Sniper
Read Jamy Bond’s latest story, published in Ghost Parachute.
Jamy Bond is an American Prose Writer
Her debut chapbook Combat Zones won the 2025 Boudin Flash Fiction Chapbook Contest judged by Roxane Gay and was published in March 2026. Her hybrid chapbook, The Island of Ghost Ships, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her stories and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in Best Microfiction 2023, The Sun Magazine, The Rumpus, and Wigleaf. She earned a BA in Philosophy and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from George Mason University where she co-founded So To Speak Journal.
She was awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant and spent three years researching and writing in Mozambique. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, which launched a decade of working in international development and disaster relief.
Jamy’s work and writing have sent her across five continents and through 25 countries, including two war zones. Today, she lives with her family on the banks of Aquia Creek just outside of Washington, DC. Contact Jamy at jamy@jamybond.com.
Stories and Creative Nonfiction
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Ralph
Wigleaf August 2026
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Surviving the Sniper
Ghost Parachute September 1, 2025
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Pariah
BULL October 2024
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Falling Man
Ghost Parachute 8th Anniversary Issue October 2024 *Nominated for Best Microfiction 202
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Swingers Circa 1972
Gooseberry Pie September 2024 *Nominated for Best Microfiction 2025
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Transplant
Your Impossible Voice
August 2024
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Phenomenology 101
Gooseberry Pie March 2024
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Denver
Bending Genres December 2023
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Note to Self
Microfiction Monday Magazine September 2023
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Nighttime Quarry Jump
The Dribble Drabble Review September 2023
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In the Company of Sadie Star
Already Gone: 40 Writers on Running Away Alan Squire Publishing November 2023
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The Zipper
Ghost Parachute August 2023
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Hunger Games
Ghost Parachute January 2023
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Tattoos
CHEAP POP September 2022 *Winner Best Microfiction 2023
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I Wish I Could Tell My Dead Husband
100 Word Story September 2022 *Nominated for Best Microfiction 2023
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The Story Inside Your Head
Ghost Parachute August 2022
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Orphans
Reckon Review
May 2022 *Nominated for Best American Short Stories 2023 and Best Microfiction 2023 -
The Midway
Flash Frog Magazine
May 2022
*Nominated for Best of the Net 2023 -
Learning to Fly
Furious Gravity Anthology
April 2022
*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize -
Prayer for the Living
Creative Nonfiction Pithead Chapel - February 2022
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What Matters
Creative Nonfiction
Bending Genres - December 2021 -
What My Mother Talks About
Ghost Parachute December 1, 2021
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Shipwrecked
Creative Nonfiction
JMWW – September 2021
Nominated for Best American Essays 2022 Selected for the Best of JMWW Anthology. -
Morphine
The Forge Literary
August 9, 2021 -
Therapy
Mac(ro)mic
June 30, 2021 -
Combat Zone
Tiny Molecules
Issue Nine, June 2021 *Wigleaf Top 50 LL 2022 -
Lesson in Survival
Janus Literary
May 2021 *Nominated for Best of the Net 2022 -
Kaysera Stops Pretty Places
Flash Frog Magazine
April 29, 2021
*Nominated for Best American Short Stories 2022 -
Gifts
Barren Magazine, Issue 18, Idle Revelries
*Editor’s Pick April 2021 -
We Thought You Might Like to Know
X-R-A-Y
February 22, 2021 -
American Girl Doll
Emerge Literary Magazine
September 2020 -
Come Here, I Want to Tell You Something
X-R-A-Y
July 24, 2020 -
The Baby
X-R-A-Y
October 28, 2019 -
(pro) ANA
Wigleaf
December 3, 2013