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A week after Easter 1973, Lily Vida Wallace is dropped like an immigrant into Greenville, South Carolina, following the lynching of Black church sexton Sam Jefferson. Returning home to Manhattan, Lily toddles further outside her familiar world while continuing theological studies in anticipation of the overturn of a centuries-old, males-only priesthood and struggling anew with her erratic engagement. When her fiancé flees following discovery of professional impropriety and Atlanta attorney Rodney Davis lands in her path, love growing between the two accelerates Lily's understanding as it challenges her naïveté about race. Some two decades later, high-profile interracial nuptials in Oakland, California, become the occasion for a reunion between the now Reverend Vida and Lucius Clay, the fiery journalist she met in South Carolina. Within weeks of their re-meeting, Lucius is dispatched to cover Black church burnings, beginning with Lily’s hometown in Texas. Writer Hilton Als recently commented: “We need to wake up to the fact that America is not one story. It is many, many, many stories.”American Blues offers no neat resolution. Instead, its timely story invites, as it tangles with, readers’ own assumptions and complex experience of race and gender in America. Author: Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck Pub Date: April 12, 2022 -
When Lidia, a blocked Latinx artist in her sixties, goes on a group tour of Namyan, a fictional Southeast Asian country reopened to the world after a long dictatorship, she gets much more than the vacation she thinks she’s signed on for. Against a backdrop of pagodas and enigmatic customs, she and the disparate crew of eighteen Americans on the tour encounter one adventure after other experiences that challenge their assumptions about their host country’s placid surface of beautiful pagodas and wandering Buddhist monks. Along the way, Lidia finds companionship and sexual pleasure with Haynes, a Black man seeking adventure even danger in Namyan. On a nighttime excursion among mysterious ancient buildings, they watch the nighttime sky. Lidia remarks that the stars look upside down–a metaphor for Namyan as a foreign place and for her. She enjoys being with Haynes but is conflicted. The final chapter reveals a secret, the source of her conflict, and her steps towards new freedom. An Upside-Down Sky is cast of characters, including their Namyanese guide, mirrors America: straight, gay, gender-fluid, black, brown, white, progressive, conservative, artistic, repressed, old, young. Some of them accept Nanyam’s charming façade at face value, while others seek to understand the country’s brutal repression by the military and ongoing ethnic conflicts. And most, resistant as they might be to change, are transformed by their time there. Author: Linda Dahl Pub Date: April 19, 2022 -
Art keeps good alive in the worst of times. In the face of ugliness, pain, and death, it’s art that has the power to open us all to a healing imagining of new possibility; it’s art that whispers to the collective that even in the ashes of loss, life always grows again. That’s why right now, in this tumultuous time of war and pandemic, we need poets more than we need politicians. In response to the multitude of global crises we’re currently experiencing, editor Stefanie Raffelock put out a much-needed call to her writing community for art to uplift and inform the world, and the authors of She Writes Press answered. Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis—a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating, but universally relatable collection of prose, poetry, and art about living through difficult times like these—is the result. Addressing topics including grief and loss, COVID-19 and war in Ukraine, the gravity of need and being needed, the broad range of human response to crisis in all its forms, and more, these pieces explore how we can find beauty, hope, and deeper interpretation of world events through art—even when the world seems like it’s been turned inside out and upside-down. Any and all royalties from Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis will be donated to World Central Kitchen. Publication Date: June 7, 2022 Editor: Stephanie Raffelock Foreword By: Brooke Warner -
Beyond the Next Village is Mary Anne Mercer’s memoir of discovery, growth, and awakening in 1978 Nepal, which was then a mysterious country to most of the world. After arriving in Nepal, Mercer, an American nurse, spent a year traveling on foot often in flip-flops with a Nepali health team, providing immunizations and clinical care in each village they visited. Communicating in a newly acquired language, she was often called upon to provide the only modern medicine available to the people she and her team were serving. Over time, she learned to recognize and respect the prominence of their cultural beliefs about health and illness. Encounters with life-threatening conditions such as severe malnutrition and ectopic pregnancy gave her an enlightening view of both the limitations and power of modern health care; immersed in villagers’ lives and those of her own team, she realized she was living in not just another country, but another time. This unique story of the joys and perils of one woman’s journey in the shadow of the Himalayas, Beyond the Next Village opens a window into a world where the spirits were as real as the trees, the birds, or the rain and healing could be as much magic as medicine. Author: Mary Anne Mercer Pub Date: May 3, 2022 -
Growing up in the ’50s in what was then the small town of Napa, California, Donna Brazzi had loving parents, a backyard the size of a football field with a swing and a big wooden picnic table perfect for summer barbecues, a cocker spaniel named Patty, and a cat named Stinky—everything a kid could want. She was a happy child. But as she grew older and started to reach for more than a young woman from a working-class, Swiss-Italian family was expected to want—a university education and a career in the larger world beyond her hometown—she began to see that if she was going to realize her big dreams, she was going to have to fight for them. Big Dreams is Donna’s story of pursuing her education goals while confronting society’s assumptions about women’s roles in work, marriage, and motherhood from the 1950s through the mid-2000s, helped along by the evolving social movements for equality. Her journey from obedient daughter to minister’s wife to PhD in sociology was never a smooth one—but ultimately, with passion and persistence, she broke free of the family and cultural assumptions constraining her, forged her own identity, and shaped the life she wanted. Author: Donna Brazzi Barnes Pub Date: April 5, 2022 -
At sixty-five, artist, writer, and psychologist Sharon Strong doesn’t fit into the cultural stereotype of “senior citizen”—and she has no desire to. Instead, she claims the next decade as the most transformational years of her life. At sixty-six, she erects the first of what will become a series of monumental sculptures on the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man. At sixty-seven, she treks in the Himalayas. At seventy, she meets the love of her life and begins a new life with him. To honor her seventy-fifth year, she delves into an inward journey with psilocybin mushrooms. But life has its own seasons and time. The Great Recession necessitates the closing of Sharon’s gallery. She comes to the end of Burning Man. A wildfire destroys her home and, most devastating of all, completely incinerates her art studio and twenty years’ worth of work. Through it all, Sharon honors her experiences—even the most painful ones—because she knows that each one helps shape who she is. Ultimately, Burning Woman is a passionate love story about the adventure of aging that will inspire readers to feel their strength and commit to living their lives to the fullest and with a sense of pride and purpose. Author: Sharon Strong Pub Date: June 21, 2022 -
Sometimes, in the blink of an eye, the unthinkable can happen; events in your life that cause you to ask: why me? Inspired, and inspiring, award winning author Jane Enright’s extraordinary uplifting memoir of surviving three life-altering events in the span of a year, losing almost everything, and coming out the other side stronger, more resilient, and happier than ever before is compelling and thought provoking. A feel-good story that everyone can relate to and learn from, Butter Side Up shows there can be happiness and joy after the unexpected—and a super awesome life, too. Author: Jane Enright Pub Date: June 7, 2022 -
After Frieda Hoffman’s second miscarriage, she felt alone, ignorant, and overwhelmed with emotions. Finding little literature or support available, her entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and she decided to create the resource she wished she’d had: real stories about pregnancy loss from real women without the off-putting lens of religion or academia so typical of the self-help genre. Through Hoffman’s own journey and those of nineteen women she interviewed, Carry Me explores universal themes of grief, bearing witness, transforming adversity into opportunity, and the paradox of feeling alone while sharing a common experience. The diverse women and narratives unpack the physical, emotional, and financial challenges of loss; notions of womanhood and motherhood; and the intersections of public health, body politics, and patient care. Readers are called to action to share their own stories in order to heal themselves and support others. Nearly everyone knows someone affected by pregnancy loss, yet most of us are not comfortable, even in the relative safety of the company of friends and sisters, discussing this serious health issue. It’s time to normalize the dialogue and help one another through our losses by sharing our resources, our wisdom, and our stories by carrying one another. Author: Frieda Hoffman Pub Date: June 7, 2022 -
Ann Josephson is a twenty-five-year-old sociopath whose compulsive kleptomania manifests itself in the most unlikely of places: the community center where she works out every day. The walls of the community center insulate her from the terrors of the outside world, which include her freelance work as a graphic artist; her socialite parents, who pay the better part of her living expenses; her therapist, who devotedly punches the clock; and the dark void of romantic relationships. As Ann battles the inner demons that plague her millennial psyche, she must also battle the fiends that plague her at the gym: the loudly grunting beefcake who can’t be bothered to drop his weights at a reasonable volume, the naked old lady in the locker room using a towel as butt floss, the housewife in yoga pants that obviate the need for yoga wheeling her double stroller up and down the indoor track. Set in suburban Kansas City in 2012, Community Klepto—a droll combination of Bridget Jones’ Diary and Choke—makes incarnate the characters and shenanigans that go on in every gym in the world. Author: Kelly I. Hitchcock Pub Date: June 21, 2022 -
When Amy Daughters reconnected with her old pal Dana on Facebook, she had no idea how it would change her life. Though the two women hadn’t had any contact in thirty years, it didn’t take them long to catch up and when Amy learned that Dana’s son Parker was doing a second stint at St. Jude battling cancer, she was suddenly inspired to begin writing the pair weekly letters. When Parker died, Amy not knowing what else to do, continued to write Dana. Eventually, Dana wrote back, and the two became penpals, sharing things through the mail that they had never shared before. The richness of the experience left Amy wondering something: If my life could be so changed by someone I considered “just a Facebook friend,” what would happen if I wrote all my Facebook friends a letter? A whopping 580 handwritten letters later Amy’s life, and most of all her heart, would never, ever, be the same again. As it turned out, there were actual individuals living very real lives behind each social media profile, and she was beautifully connected to each of those extraordinary, flawed people for a specific reason. They loved her, and she loved them. And nothing, not politics, beliefs, or lifestyle could separate them. Author: Amy Weinland Daughters Pub Date: May 17, 2022 -
“Why is this moment happening in my life and what can I learn from it?” Michelle Douglas asked and answered this question almost every day for ten years, writing down one thing she learned each day from ages twenty-one to thirty-one. In these pages, she shares her experiences and learnings from the adventures that lie ahead for young adults—moving, working, loving, losing, quitting, building, and more, all while attempting to maintain a strong sense of self. Written for anyone just starting out or suddenly starting over, this field guide—part advice book, part journal—will help you discover the very important yet not-so-obvious lessons to be learned in your own life right now. Things like . . .- the weakness isn’t necessarily where the leak is
- surround yourself with people who are willing to lift while they climb
- you can’t change the shape of a piece to force it into your puzzle
- don’t go looking for love, go looking for things you love to do
- it’s what you bring to the table, not how long you’ve been sitting at it
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As a young book lover with dyslexia, Barbara found the solution to her reading struggles in Miss Gluding, her first grade teacher, who showed compassion for her student’s plight—and knew how to help her. From that time on, Barbara knew what she wanted to be: a teacher, just like Miss Gluding. Unfortunately, Barbara also had some bad teachers in the years that ensued—including her sixth grade teacher, an exacting woman who called attention to Barbara’s learning disabilities in front of classmates. Still wanting to follow in Miss Gluding’s footsteps in 1964, Barbara vowed she would be a better one than her sixth grade teacher; instead, however, she became very much like her, with unattainable expectations for her students and herself. After seventeen years in the teaching profession, she realized she had to either change her teaching style or change careers. By providence, right as she stood at this crossroads, she was offered the opportunity to teach overseas at The Dragon School in Oxford, England, for a year—an opportunity she jumped at. In the year that followed, Barbara would rely on her faith in God to give up a lot of what she knew about teaching and learn to do it differently—ways that wouldn’t have room for her perfectionism. In short, she would have to begin again. Author: Barbara Kennard Pub Date: June 14, 2022 -
As her sweetheart’s body lies cooling on the living room floor, Joni Sensel shattered but not surprised, revisits her premonition about this moment. From nearly the start of their fairytale romance less than four years ago, she knew she would lose Tony, the man she considered to be her soulmate. He was in great health, but fate had other plans a hard truth that visited Joni in the form of a startling vision during their second weekend together. Though she kept the premonition a secret while Tony was alive, upon his death she’s compelled to share it with his spirit in the form of a letter. A grief memoir with a paranormal twist, Feeling Fate explores how a dark intuition magnified Sensel’s love and gratitude in the time she and Tony had together before her premonition came true. Faced with evidence of a grand design alongside her grief, she’s torn between faith and skepticism. While she’s nearly undone by the pain of her loss, she eventually discovers that a sassy imagination and the irrational insights of the heart can both defeat despair and transform her grief into meaning. Author: Joni Sensel Pub Date: April 26, 2022 -
Charles Booker is thrilled to start married life in Two Harbors, Minnesota, with his ambitious ornithologist bride, Caroline—but he sabotages his own happiness when, blinded by his desire for a family, he tricks Caroline into a pregnancy she doesn’t want. Caroline, bold and unapologetic, follows her own nature and holds Charles to his promise to parent their daughter without her help—an arrangement that allows her to travel the world and follow her birds, wherever they may take her. This uneasy truce results in near tragedy for their daughter, Grace, who comes of age in a household full of toxic resentment on the one side and suffocating love on the other, and increasingly struggles with her mental health as she grows older. Told by all three of the characters involved and set against the backdrop of Lake Superior, Finding Grace is a piercing chronicle of the struggles and eventual insight gained by each over the years, starting with Charles and Caroline’s courtship and continuing into Grace’s early adulthood—and a poignant coming-of-age journey for both Grace and her parents. Author: Maren Cooper Pub Date: July 19, 2022 -
A fictional diary set in interwar Germany and Spain allows us to peek into the life of Klara Philipsborn, the only Communist in her merchant-class, German-Jewish family.Klara’s first visit to Seville in 1925 opens her eyes and her spirit to an era in which Spain’s major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, shared deep cultural connections. At the same time, she is made aware of the harsh injustices that persist in Spanish society. By 1930, she has landed a position with the medical school in Madrid. Though she feels compelled to hide her Jewish identity in her predominantly Christian new home, she finds that she feels less “different” in Spain than she did in Germany, especially as she learns new ways of expressing her opinions and desires. And when the Spanish Civil War erupts in 1936, Klara (now “Clara”) enlists in the Fifth Regiment, a step that transports her across the geography of the embattled peninsula and ultimately endangers a promising relationship and even Clara’s life itself. A blending of thoroughly researched history and engrossing fiction, Home So Far Away is an epic tale that will sweep readers away. Author: Judith Berlowitz Pub Date: June 21, 2022 -
Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flautist living in the country with her husband, Ben and their four-year old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben gets out, leaving her and Addie to die. Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate to help her daughter, she struggles to emerge from the icy waters, and follows them. Once she enters the forest, however, she finds herself trapped in a sinister dream-like world where night never ends, where Addie’s whereabouts remain hidden from her and where she encounters a group of women who, like Francesca, have been left to die and now seek to unleash their revenge on those who have harmed them. When they have Ben in their sights, Francesca realizes that if she is ever to escape this nightmare and save her daughter, she must first save the husband who abandoned them. Author: Susan Speranza Pub Date: May 24, 2022 -
When Caitlin Billings became a therapist, she did so with an intention to heal from her past. She wasn’t planning on a mental health relapse or an involuntary psychiatric hold. She was a mother now. A mental health professional. She thought the issues she’d faced in her past were dealt with, tucked away forever. She was wrong. Over the years, Billings contends with bipolar disorder while raising two children and fighting to regain her footing as a clinician. She feels she’s finally gotten a handle on her mental health when, on the cusp of adolescence, her elder child begins to struggle with disordered eating and depressive symptoms. Convinced that she is to blame for her child’s struggles, Billings pivots her attention to this new crisis, determined to keep it together for her family—but after it comes out that sexual abuse has taken place in their home, she questions her ability to protect her children and experiences a relapse. Amidst all this turmoil, her elder child also comes out as transgender, forcing yet another kind of reckoning. Billings must find a way to accept the many changes and unexpected challenges that have reared up in their lives—and, ultimately, to accept herself. Author: Caitlin Billings Pub Date: July 12, 2022 -
After both her parents die, Linda Murphy Marshall, a multi-linguist and professional translator, returns to her midwestern childhood home, Ivy Lodge, to sort through a lifetime of belongings with her siblings. Room by room, she sifts through the objects in her parents’ house and uses her skills and perspective as a longtime professional translator to make sense of the events of her past—to “translate” her memories and her life. In the process, she sees things with new eyes. All of her parents’ things, everything having to do with their cherished hobbies, are housed in a home that, although it looks impressive from the outside, is anything but impressive inside; in short, she now realizes that much of it —even the house’s fancy name—was show. By the time Murphy Marshall is done with Ivy Lodge, she has not only made new discoveries about her past, she has also come to a new understanding of who she is and how she fits into her world. Author: Linda Murphy Marshall Pub Date: July 12, 2022 -
Tom Smiley signed up as a private in the Confederate army when he was eighteen and quickly came to regret it. Spending the last year of the war in a Union prison scarred him so deeply that even death hasn't brought freedom from its memory. A ghost in his deserted childhood home, he can’t forget the bloody war and its meaningless losses, or shed his revulsion for his role in the Confederate defense of slavery. But when a young couple moves in and makes his home their own in the early 21st century, trouble erupts—and Tom is forced to not only face his own terrible secret but also come to grips with his family’s hidden wartime history. He finds an unexpected ally in his house’s new owner, Phoebe Hunter, who is both fascinated and frightened by his ghostly presence—and whose discoveries will have momentous consequences for them both. Author: Abigail Cutter Pub Date: July 12, 2022 -
For fans of Marie Benedict, Lauren Willig, and Diana Gabaldon, comes a Gothic romance about the charming and ambitious glassmaker René Lalique, the mysterious Englishwoman he falls in love with and their haunting encounters. Fascinated by the occult, René feels stifled, apprenticed to a traditional jeweler. Yearning for the creative freedom to explore the mythical world in his art, he leaves Paris to study at the Crystal Palace outside London. There, he meets Lucinda Haliburton and her dysfunctional family. Having returned from an archaeological dig and tomb discovery in Egypt, Lucinda believes she is preyed upon by ancient spirits. Rene finds her unearthly situation both enchanting and frightening. Is it imagination, delusional, or a real ghostly encounter? Magician of Light illuminates the dark side of Lalique’s life while spinning a suspenseful tale of twisting fates. An enthralling love story filled with historical intrigue and overshadowed by the unknowable. Author: J. Fremont Pub Date: May 17, 2022 -
A full one-fifth of the United States has engaged in consensual non-monogamy (CNM) at some point in their lives, and 29 percent of adults under thirty today consider open relationships to be morally acceptable—yet there are few resources to turn to when it comes to navigating this more non-traditional and explorative territory. Picking up where CNM self-help books like Open Up, The Ethical Slut, and More Than Two leave off, Open Deeplytackles the most difficult challenges posed by CNM. Therapist Kate Loree—who has practiced non-monogamy since 2003, and who specializes in treating clients who also practice non-monogamy—pulls no punches as she uses vignettes based on her own life, as well as her clients’ experiences, to illustrate the highs, lows, and in-betweens of life as a consensual non-monogamist. Interwoven with these stories are thorough explanations of how attachment theory impacts non-monogamy, how blending cutting-edge, neurobiology-informed grounding skills with effective communication skills will make even the most challenging conversations regarding non-monogamy manageable, and more. The result is a compassionate, attachment-focused template for non-monogamy that will allow readers to avoid pitfalls and find adventure while concurrently building healthy relationships. Non-monogamy is a wild and woolly ride—and Open Deeply is here to help make it a great one. Author: Kate Loree Pub Date: April 19, 2022 -
Lucinda Jackson, a harried scientist and business executive, sets off to make a break from her corporate decades and have an “extraordinary” retirement. She launches into a five-phase “Project Escape,” complete with a vision, goals, and a scorecard of success to deliver this next chapter. Soon, Jackson and her semi-reluctant husband of thirty years are off to the Pacific island country of Palau. But while Jackson got the girl out of the corporation, even the jolt of Palau can’t fully get the corporation out of the girl. Struggling through self-examination around purpose, identity, ego, marriage, and parenthood after years of investing so much in career, Jackson learns who she is again. Whether you’re thinking ahead to retirement or are already there, Project Escape provides an unvarnished but ultimately encouraging reference in navigating the “post-career” era. Author: Lucinda Jackson Pub Date: April 12, 2022 -
Clare Rainbow-Dashell, the only child of delightfully eccentric, wealthy hippies, has just taken a hiatus from her career as an acclaimed wildlife photographer and returned to California to pursue her academic dreams when a disastrous affair with a professor catapults her to another continent: Africa. There, she immerses herself in well-paid commercial work for a luxury safari lodge as she seeks to regain her emotional and financial self-reliance. All this, however, is complicated by her relationship with her charismatic, imperious employer and her undeniable attraction to a leading black rhino specialist two men who are at war over both environmental politics and Clare herself. Set against the formidable backdrop of the Namib Desert, Rhino Dreams dramatizes the crisis of endangered species preservation and the horrors of poaching, interweaving this very real ecological darkness with the internal and external battles of three characters driven by fierce passions and divided notions of duty, ambition, and desire. It is a sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant ride and, in the end, a testimony to how tenuous and precious both life and love can be. Author: Carolyn Waggoner and Kathryn Williams Pub Date: April 19, 2022 -
2023 Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Autobiography/Biography 2022 Foreword INDIES Finalist in Autobiography & Memoir—Adult Nonfiction 2022 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards Honorable Mention in Non-Fiction—Autobiography 2022 IPPY Awards Bronze Winner in Autobiography II—Coming of Age/Family
“Sublime writing brightens an unforgettable, harrowing personal account.”—Kirkus Reviews “...a testament to the human spirit that will not be denied fulfilling its potential. Armento gives witness to the hard fact that we sometimes have to nurture ourselves and shows just how that can be done.”—Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences THE STORY OF ONE GIRL’S SEARCH FOR HOPE IN AN ABUSIVE, DYSFUNCTIONAL HOME AND OF THE TEACHERS WHO EMPOWERED HER As the “Seeing Eye Girl” for her blind, artistic, and mentally ill mother, Beverly Armento was intimately connected with and responsible for her, even though her mother physically and emotionally abused her. She was Strong Beverly at school—excellent in academics and mentored by caring teachers—but at home she was Weak Beverly, cowed by her mother’s rage and delusions.Beverly's mother regained her sight with two corneal transplants in 1950 and went on to enjoy a moment of fame as an artist, but these positive turns did nothing to stop her disintegration into her delusional world of communists, radiation, and lurking Italians. To survive, Beverly had to be resilient and hopeful that better days could be ahead. But first, she had to confront essential ethical issues about her caregiving role in her family.
In this emotional memoir, Beverly shares the coping strategies she invented to get herself through the trials of her young life, and the ways in which school and church served as refuges over the course of her journey. Breaking the psychological chains that bound her to her mother would prove to be the most difficult challenge of her life—and, ultimately, the most liberating one. Author: Beverly J. Armento Pub Date: July 5, 2022
