Discovering place, family, and memory in Annie Woodford’s poetry

“Poetry allows you to preserve a certain moment, a certain place. It’s giving voice to something that otherwise I would just carry around mutely,” says poet Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come From Is Gone and winner of the Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia. “Then, when you think about economic systems or […]

Essaying our world

Nell Greenfieldboyce’s debut book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, delivers on the promise of its title. A carefully woven and emotionally resonant collection of creative nonfiction essays, the book is as much a cabinet of curiosities as it is a glimpse behind the curtain of motherhood in contemporary America.  “For nearly […]

Worthy journey

Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road […]

Ecological wonder

“To tell you about the beauty, I must also speak of threat,” writes Greg Wrenn in Mother­ship: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. A complex exploration into personal and ecological trauma that also investigates alter­native healing and the cultivation of wonder, this book is as much a prompt for personal reflection as it is a […]

Pandemic dwellings

Drawing inspiration from The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a “collaborative novel,” which brings to mind thoughts of exquisite corpses and shared Google Docs with a slew of anonymous animals. However, it is effectively a collection of short stories by 36 American and Canadian authors, edited by Margaret Atwood and […]

Honest and direct

Ben Sloan’s second book of poems, Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky, is a collection of work that speaks to various themes and eras, highlighting the far-ranging interests of its author. As an object, the book is a delight, an elegant pamphlet with a cover that captures the bright blue of sky and a […]

Addiction and identity

Poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, explores themes of addiction and sobriety, grief and grace, trauma and love. Rich with Daedalian prose, this semi-autobiographical bildungsroman tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet and recovering alcoholic.  Born in Iran but currently living in an Indiana college town, Cyrus is drifting, purposeless, and […]

Life among the ruins

“The loveliness of deer might go without saying, but still, there it is: The more you look, the more they seduce,” writes Erika Howsare in her debut nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors. Published earlier this month, the book showcases Howsare’s keen journalistic skills as well as her […]

Local author Emma Rathbone stays focused with Losing It

Writing a novel isn’t easy by most measures, but it’s said that your second novel is where the anxiety really kicks in. Pressure builds to craft a book that’s readable and critically embraced, without being too similar to its predecessor. Of course, this is even more true if your first was met with popular success. […]

Chris Keup launches music publishing company Salinger Songs

It’s no secret that Chris Keup’s White Star Sound studio has a knack for producing stellar tracks for local as well as nationally known musicians. Now Keup is working to expand his purview with a new venture in music publishing: Salinger Songs. Related Links: White Star Sound offers musicians a full-service lift-off A musician and […]