Diane Botnick

A passion for literature, as both reader and writer, directed Diane Botnick to City College's Creative Writing masters program, where she served as FICTION magazine's student editor and published several magazine articles and a series of interactive kids books with a colleague. She has worked for a number of cultural institutions, including WNET's Great Performances, the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the artist Isamu Noguchi, the Dia Art Foundation, and Workman Publishing. More recently, she has enjoyed serving as a mentor in the Girls Write Now program. Diane was on Glimmertrain’s top 25 list with a short story, and an excerpt from her novel, Numbered Days, was one of 36 to make it into the final voting round in Fiction for the 2018 NYFA/NYSCA award in literature.

Numbered Days

1942. A baby girl is born inside a war. From one unfriendly womb to another she goes. It’s like living in a fishbowl: the view is panoramic but the glass won’t give. So it’s she who must. Learning this takes time. It happens in winter, this birth, this unlikely, uncelebrated event. A winter that so efficiently brands her with its cold, she is never not cold again. So cold that of all the things she might wish to do over, chief among them is to have been born in summer. It happens in Auschwitz, this birth.

Issue 20, December 2018

Diane Botnick

A passion for literature, as both reader and writer, directed Diane Botnick to City College's Creative Writing masters program, where she served as FICTION magazine's student editor and published several magazine articles and a series of interactive kids books with a colleague. She has worked for a number of cultural institutions, including WNET's Great Performances, the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the artist Isamu Noguchi, the Dia Art Foundation, and Workman Publishing. More recently, she has enjoyed serving as a mentor in the Girls Write Now program. Diane was on Glimmertrain’s top 25 list with a short story, and an excerpt from her novel, Numbered Days, was one of 36 to make it into the final voting round in Fiction for the 2018 NYFA/NYSCA award in literature.

Numbered Days

1942. A baby girl is born inside a war. From one unfriendly womb to another she goes. It’s like living in a fishbowl: the view is panoramic but the glass won’t give. So it’s she who must. Learning this takes time. It happens in winter, this birth, this unlikely, uncelebrated event. A winter that so efficiently brands her with its cold, she is never not cold again. So cold that of all the things she might wish to do over, chief among them is to have been born in summer. It happens in Auschwitz, this birth.

Issue 20, December 2018

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