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Alicia Mountain: Four in Hand

Writers & Books 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political […]

Margaret Ray: Good Grief, the Ground

Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted onto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from the […]

Stephen Schottenfeld: This Room Is Made of Noise

Writers & Books 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY

In this quietly mesmerizing novel, no one, including the protagonist, is ever entirely sure of their motivations. Existing in the liminal spaces between altruism and greed, This Room Is Made of Noise deftly explores the shades of gray that lie between our desires and our demons. “Everything you want in a novel: exquisitely imagined, big-hearted, […]

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Jessica Q. Stark: Buffalo Girl

Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women’s bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam, beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes—lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of […]

Ravi Mangla Fiction Workshop: The Sentence as an Event

Writers & Books 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY

What makes a powerful sentence? How do you write sentences that worm their way into the ear and propel the reader forward? In this workshop, we'll analyze the anatomy of compelling sentences by looking at a range of authors, including Christine Schutt, Michael Ondaatje, and Jamaica Kincaid. You will have time and opportunity to practice […]

Mahtem Shiferraw: Nomenclatures of Invisibility

Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors […]

Kristen Gentry: Mama Said

Writers & Books 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY

The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in […]

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Jeannine Hall Gailey: Flare, Corona

740 University Ave, Rochester, NY

Against a constellation of solar weather events and an evolving pandemic, Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the ways in which we prevail and persevere through health adversities while facing an uncertain future. Gailey juxtaposes eclipses and hurricanes with a body’s many medical challenges, including neurological symptoms, highlighting the miraculous while melding the personal with […]

George Looney: The Visibility of Things Long Submerged

Dripping with Southern gothic flavors, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the holy and the obscene while plumbing gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. Densely […]

Adebe DeRango-Adem: Vox Humana

Writers & Books 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY

In and through literary experiments with word and sound, utterance and song, Vox Humana considers the different ways a body can assert, recount, and proclaim. Born from the polyphonic phenomenon of the author’s multilingual upbringing, these poems are autobiographical and alchemical, singular and plural, but, above all, a celebration of the (breath) work required for […]

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