My Valley Is Icky Too

Literature & Fiction

De Niscia, Lisa

Contemporary

Whitepoint Press

Nazifa Islam's debut poetry collection tells the story of Rosemary who wants to love and to be loved but finds it tragically impossible.

Searching for a Pulse

Islam, Nazifa

Poetry

Set in Lesotho and South Africa, Courtney McDermott’s debut story collection unveils a perspective of African life that is both startling and intimate. An Afrikaner woman sleeps with a shotgun because she fears black Africans, an undead garbage man “saves” lives by taking them, a modern day Cinderella struggles to escape the bitter residual constraints of colonialism. These twenty-two tales embrace graphic realism, energetic bursts of truths that may otherwise go unnoticed, and magic.

How They Spend Their Sundays

McDermott, Courtney

Literary

Seth Johnson's debut story collection comprises twelve linked tales set in Kentucky against the backdrop of the disintegration of a young marriage amidst thwarted expectations and contrasted by illustrations of the unconditional love freely given by dogs. A man on the run hides out at a boarding house owned by a paraplegic woman whose uncle's dog gives birth with an ease that impresses the observers of this ordinary event. A young man confesses his extramarital affairs to his mother. A housewife attends the funeral of a young woman whom she never knew. In precise, evocative prose, The Things We Do for Women explores the perpetual desire for love and the obstacles to obtaining it.

The Things We Do for Women

Johnson, Seth

Short Stories & Anthologies

This interracial, intergenerational saga of love, land and loss is told from the disparate perspectives of Ruth Thatcher, who is Black, and Jonas Thatcher, who is White, and spans nearly a century. The story begins in 1917 when Ruth and Jonas are farm children and ends in 2005 as their descendants struggle to unravel and understand the legacies of this star-crossed pair. During the course of their lifetimes, Ruth and Jonas-- and their respective families-- have evolved and ultimately have prospered, but it is left for their descendants to come to grips with the long-unacknowledged truth that the two families are actually one.

Belle City

Mickelbury, Penny

Wade Rule decides to escape his dominating mother by taking it upon himself to go to Vermont to care for his wheelchair-bound uncle who, Wade's father tells him, has recently lost his girlfriend to a "man whose legs work." Wade reveals his dream to a fellow high school student, Maria, who tells him, "I'd run off to Vermont before I'd live with my father." Wade then knows he'll have to hurry because Maria is planning to have herself declared a ward of the state within a week. She has given Wade the confidence to get them both to a better home; however, Wade's confidence is misplaced, and when he shows up at school with a shotgun to fetch Maria, things quickly go horribly wrong.

Lighting the World

Drown, Merle

Off Somewhere, Z.Z. Boone's debut story collection, is populated by characters who seek recognition and empowerment in a world that has suddenly become baffling. The tone of these eighteen stories ranges from a humorous account of a young student obsessed with an unobtainable fast-food worker, to a cartoonist forced to face the fact that brotherly hatred runs deeper than brotherly love, to a young woman hoping a homemade cake will keep her parents' marriage intact. The characters are, for the most part, ordinary people driven to exceptional actions.

Off Somewhere

Boone, Z. Z.

This poetry collection is a meditation on language. The first section delves into Americans’ pursuit of Spanish as a second language. They take the literal grammar of the “imperfect” as a metaphor for the language acquisition process. The second section revolves around experiences as an English language and poetry teacher working with immigrant communities. The final section focuses on the languages of family.

Imperfect Tense

Cahnmann-Taylor, Melisa

The Treasures That Prevail is about climate change and its effects on Miami; the poems in this collection confront the ills of modern society in general, mourn both public and personal losses, and predict the difficulties of a post-modern life in a flooded, Atlantis-like lost city. The narrators are two unnamed women, married with a teenage daughter and a teenage son, who live in a part of Miami that will be underwater unless action is taken. The Treasures That Prevail is a parable about what could happen to any of our low-lying coastal cities if we don’t start to make changes now.

The Treasures That Prevail

Karetnick, Jen

Compelling and vivid, the stories in Bread and Salt use the metaphor of salvage to consider the reclamation of the natural environment, human relationships, and material objects. The characters in these stories live and travel in Tunisia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Turkey, France, and the United States and consider their individual agency in both local and global contexts. The characters' conflicts reveal how family and friendships are enriched by differences.

Bread and Salt

Miner, Valerie

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