The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a Literature Grant to Henne Lena Van Campen for her upcoming experimental novella, Guadalhorce Leaves Bayonne Forever.

Henne works between many disciplines. She has published three chapbooks of poetry and is currently selling her first novel, Pneuma. Of late, she was selected as a finalist in The Indiana Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest and was a recipient of a grant from Staten Island Arts. Her first movie, N.A., is currently in the works courtesy of The Antirealist Producers, to be released in early 2027. Outside of creative pursuits, she works freelance in museums such as the Guggenheim, New Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Guadalhorce Leaves Bayonne Forever is an experimental novella that takes its name from a John A. Noble painting. Growing up in and around the waterways of Staten Island, Henne came to this project through a deep interrogation of how space changes as industry shifts—primarily with the goal of showing how physical space shapes language. 

The novella follows a boy, Anibal Guadalhorce, through his first twenty years of life, growing up as an orphan who works in the age of steamships. Learning language after language of the dockworkers, he moves through the world apathetically, without anything tying him down, that is, until he learns to read at the age of 19. This is the first time he is away from the bays, kills, or docks, but it eventually leads to him finding work as a translator for an explorer who wants to chronicle the differences in the age of exploration and the age of steamships. Little does Guadalhorce know though, but this will be the last time he leaves Bayonne. 

Along this journey (done purely out of the captain's hubris), the boat meets a storm, of which Guadalhorce is the only survivor. As the boy is left to float in "the empty handed blue of the Caribbean" while holding onto a grandfather clock, the prose begins to dissolve, leaving empty space on the page and morphing into a poem that recounts the many languages of immigrants in which Guadalhorce has learned to explore themes of how language epistemically constricts or delimits us.