Poetry. "Born of keen attention and memory, these poems have been honed to a fine edge by Judith Slater's ability to marry intimacy and detachment, producing work that is insightful, incisive, and often breath-taking."—Margaret Gibson"Poem after poem...brings the past to shimmering life.... The poems convince by their steadiness of eye and mind, their resolution to be in the world and of the world."—Neil Shepard

The Wind Turning Pages

Literature & Fiction

Slater, Judith

Poetry

Outriders Poetry Project

The World Imagined

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Buffalo Arts Publishing

Selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories

Humor & Satire

Sarabande Books

Judith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories introduces a writer who approaches the world at a surprisingly oblique angle. Judith Slater writes in a prose dance, dramatizing the lives of ordinary people who wonder what they can do to bring more passion into their lives, or at least less loneliness.
The characters in these stories are a diverse bunch-a floral clerk with aspirations of being a ballet dancer, a photographer volunteering to take the pictures at his ex-girlfriendÕs wedding, a father playing the role of reluctant chaperon at his daughter's school dance-but all of them are alert to the moments of possibility, transcendence, and sometimes even magic that exist just under the surface of ordinary life.
Slater is unafraid to employ the surreal or absurd twist: in the title story, a woman creates a perfect baby in her mind; in "Phil's Third Eye," a chance encounter at a Laundromat ends in a bizarre battle of wills; in "Our New Life," a woman finds that her former therapist has decided to make the same drastic change in her own life as she had encouraged in her patient's, and a strange challenge is issued to decide who has taken the greater risk; the narrator of "Soft Money," worried about job security in the large corporation she works for, hits upon a unique solution to the problem of downsizing.
In vivid, witty prose, Judith Slater presents a world where people come together and make do, as they learn to live with the odd possibilities in life.
Judith Slater grew up in Oregon and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her stories have appeared in Redbook, Seventeen, Greensboro Review, Sonora Review, American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Colorado Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she lives during the academic year. She spends her summers in Ashland, Oregon.
"Judith Slater is a writer whose work rings true to experience: her observation of the world is keen, reported

Covering psychologist Judith Slater's life from childhood into retirement, this collection of her poetry follows Judith from her earliest memories at the end of WWII to the present. Judith lives in Buffalo where she works as a therapist. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner and Passager. Several were selected by Ted Kooser for his website American Life in Poetry. A book of poems The Wind Turning Pages was published by Outriders Poetry Project in 2011 and a memoir The World Imagined was published by Buffalo Arts Publishing in 2018.

Every Step of the Way

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Slater, Judith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Slater, Judith

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Slater, Judith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wind Turning Pages

The World Imagined

The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories

The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories

Every Step of the Way