Contributor Updates – Page 3

Contributor Update: Christopher Burawa

January 24, 2024January 22, 2024Superstition Review

Congratulations to past contributor Christopher Burawa who recently published Where I Came Here From.

Where I Came Here From is a collection of Zen Buddhist inspired poems that occasionally wander a path to the north-to Iceland, Christopher Burawa’s birthplace. The Iceland poems reflect, as Cynthia Hogue suggests, an “Icelandic Zen,” of the Self examining itself, unearthing what remains of his connections to the past and the trauma of separation, of being caught in the illusion of the fixated, isolated self. In these poems he follows the schematics of the skandhas and dependent origination, tracing the activity of mind and as the reborn self that arises from its dwelling.

The book has received significant praise:

Very few books of poetry move me the way Christopher Burawa’s Where I Came Here From has with its celebration of the imagination. The poems are like trapdoors, giving way to a world where you are both lost and found. Here, you find your way—through wit and earnestness, the playful and the profound—until “the cosmos breaks / open to let you through.”

–Blas Falconer

The perceptions inside Christopher Burawa’s collection invite you to track and take-in, live and breathe within some profound and defamiliarized spaces. These poems exist on a continuous and steep terrain, there to observe the rock’s jagged path, as well as the traveler’s clear-eyed navigation of an obscure map—and so these poems comfort you amidst all that’s unknowable; they ask you to gaze headlong while your hands pass uncut through a cold window, because, despite what you’ve understood before holding this book, “really, a river is a door, / until it opens.”

–Melissa Cundieff

“With deepest humility, a profound commitment to love, and reverence for truth, a book like Where I Came Here From appears. This does not happen frequently, this peeking into the ordinary with a view to what is there, not really there, but there in the sense of where we live. Burawa takes us beyond the illusion of thought and the firm conviction that some things hurt beyond what we think we can bear, and other things give us immeasurable joy, or hopefulness. We all should know what it takes to write a book of poems like this one. This is Zen.”

–Afaa Michael Weaver

Read more about Christopher’s book on the Finishing Line Press website.

Christopher Burawa is a poet, translator, high school language arts teacher, and ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk. He received an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. He has received numerous awards for his work, including an NEA Translation Fellowship, Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Research Fellowship, Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency, among others. He lives with his wife and daughter in Red Wing, Minnesota.

View Christopher Burawa’s’ poems in issue 10 and issue 23 of Superstition Review

Contributor Update: Vanessa Lopez Aziz

October 23, 2023October 17, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to past contributor Vanessa Lopez Aziz who recently published Play it Back.

In her debut novel, Aziz tells the story of a 27-year-old Asian-American woman, Carmen, who reels she has a perfect life. She has a hard-won life and independent lifestyle with a rewarding job, a loving boyfriend, and great friends. She grew up from a socially awkward teenager with immigrant parents and no college acceptances to the person she is today. She has no reason to want to relive her teen years, but that’s exactly what happens when she reluctantly attends her high school reunion and finds herself transported ten years in the past to relive her senior year. Knowing how her life turns out, she figures while she’s in 1999, she might as well enjoy it. She joins drama club, goes to parties, and flirts with the boy who will become her future fiancé. It’s not all fun and games, though, as she realizes her best friends chafe under the changes and her parents’ marriage implodes. As she struggles to navigate her past life, Carmen must confront the question of why she was sent here in the first place – a question that may lead her to the realization that the life she thought had turned out so perfectly may not be everything she dreamed of after all.

The book has received significant praise:

“Play it Back thrives on a simple, but compelling premise – What would happen if you woke up in the body of your younger self? What does it mean? What would you do differently? The novel is an intriguing read from page one, establishing Vanessa Lopez Aziz as an engaging literary voice who deftly blends adult sensibilities with an anxious environment of adolescent uncertainty – and the pressure to navigate (or renavigate) the final year of high school with the promise of college on the horizon. Along the way, Aziz explores the complexities of everyday life – family and friendship, love and loyalty – while seamlessly weaving elements of her own Filipino heritage into a narrative that never strays from its relatable tone. The nostalgic references are a welcome touch for those who remember using printed MapQuest directions instead of GPS systems to drive our teenage friends around to weekend parties.” – Rob Kachelriess, Trivago Magazine

View more of Vanessa’s creative work on her website. Purchase Play it Back here.

Vanessa Lopez Aziz spent the first decade of her adulthood adventuring. She has lived along California’s coast, Nevada, the Alaskan frontier, England, and Eastern Europe. She’s jumped off mountains, excavated ancient archaeological sites, and lived out of a backpack for years at a time. These days, she is more often found writing than living adventures. She is a first-generation half-Filipino and half-Pakistani. She felt a lack of media representation growing up and now writes stories she has always wished to see more of, populated with quirky protagonists finding their way when traditional labels don’t fit. When she’s not writing, she works as a nurse in child psychiatry.

View Vanessa Lopez Aziz’ “Three Parables” in issue 31 of Superstition Review

Contributor Update: Marcia Aldrich

October 17, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Marcia Aldrich on her forthcoming essay collection Studio of the Voice, coming out in February 2024.

In her essay collection, Aldrich invites readers on a journey of personal exploration of women’s lives, discussing themes such as the complicated love of mothers for daughters and daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more. The essays speak in a voice that is uniquely hers: revealing, comic, elegiac, perceptive, and wise. Each essay takes on dazzling form; some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode–each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.

Award-winning Aldrich has received significant praise for her newest essay collection.

“Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich’s Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With an eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.” —Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: Essays

“In Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it’s not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.” —David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel Amerika

“No writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe’s foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.” —Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

In addition to Studio of the Voice, Aldrich also recently wrote “My First Old Person” on Oldster. Additionally, “In My Head: Tinnitus” was nominated for Best of the Net 2023.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of Girl Rearing, Companion to an Untold Story, Haze Underway, Waveform, and Edge. Her writing has received awards such as the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. View more of Marcia’s work on her website, where you can also view how to order Studio of the Voice.

View Marcia Aldrich’s “The Year in Review” in issue 23 of Superstition Review.

Bill Gaythwaite’s Underburn

October 16, 2023October 17, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR contributor Bill Gaythwaite on his debut novel, Underburn.

Underburn explores the emotional vicissitudes of a family in flux while introducing endearing and irresistible characters. The story follows Iris Flynn, an acerbic self-sufficient seventy-three-year-old widow with a minor Hollywood career in her past and some streamlined kitchen cabinets inspired by Marie Kondo. Her composed and simplified existence is disrupted when her son Frank lands on her doorstep after his rental home is destroyed in a wildfire, the latest in a string of personal setbacks in his life. He arrives with Logan, his twenty-five-year-old “startlingly handsome” boyfriend, a featured extra on a teen soap opera with a loyal Instagram following. Soon, news from Iris’ estranged family in Maine forces everyone out of their comfort zone. Iris convinces Frank and Logan to travel with her to the potato farm which she made a quick getaway fifty years earlier, unleashing a funny and poignant family saga about secrets, forgiveness, and the fluctuations of the human heart.

The book has received significant praise:

“A quirky family story told with wit and wisdom, with shades of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A wonderfully engaging tale of both family and the underside of fame, Bill Gaythwaite’s debut novel Underburn mirrors the deceptive richness of the very generational ties it so charmingly explores: the long memories, conflicts big and small, surprisingly pivotal moments, and rediscovered bonds. One rarely encounters characters drawn with such candor, warmth, and humanity: you will gladly cheer and care for everyone as they seek to make peace with the past, while risking it all for a brand-new future.” —Natalie Jenner, author of the international bestseller The Jane Austen Society

“A poignant, funny, and timely family drama following the often-twisted paths we navigate toward understanding, reconciliation, and forgiveness.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men

“A witty, heartfelt novel with endearing, imperfect characters who are impossible to resist, a deft examination of a family in flux.” —Kristyn Kusek Lewis, contributing books editor, Real Simple

Learn more about Bill at his website. Preorder the hardcover of Underburn here.

Bill Gaythwaite is an established writer whose short fiction has appeared in Subtropics, Chicago Quarterly Review, Puerto Del Sol, december, Solstice, and many other publications. Gaythwaite’s work can also be found in the anthologies Mudville Diaries: A Book of Baseball Memories and Hashtag Queer: LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology, vols. 1 and 2. Gaythwaite has worked at Columbia University since 2006, where he was on the staff of the Committee on Asia and the Middle East. He is currently the Assistant Director of Special Populations at Columbia Law School. Gaythwaite grew up in Boston and raised his son in New York City and its suburbs. An avid swimmer, movie aficionado, and football fan, he lives in New Jersey with his partner, Tom. He has been writing stories since he was six years old. Underburn is Gaythwaite’s debut novel.

View “Dear Coach Carl” in issue 14 of Superstition Review or read Gaythwaite’s guest posts on the Superstition Review blog.

Perishable by Stelios Mormoris

October 9, 2023October 4, 2023Superstition Review

Stelios Mormoris has a forthcoming poetry collection, Perishable, which will soon be published from Tupelo Press.

Mormoris’ first book, The Oculus, received generous praise from established voices. Award-winning poet Donald Revell says of The Oculus, “Like memory, sunlight itself is both elusive and overwhelming. We live and we compose our lives in the interstices, in gaps both riven and secured by Vision. In The Oculus, Mormoris bodies forth a vivid myth of the interstices, bathed in sunlight, swathed in shadow … Here are poems of serenity in turbulence, dearly welcome now.” Other literary voices such as Kylie Minogue, Christine Kondoleon, Renée Fleming, Courtney Love Cobain, and Dan Beachy-Quick praised the book.

Poet and NEA fellow Emma Bolden observes, “As the title suggests, Stelios Mormoris’ The Oculus offers the reader a lush and vibrant view of the world. Mormoris’ view is expansive, revealing the gorgeous, rich vistas that surround us all in daily life. In these beautifully constructed poems, the humble objects of everyday life—‘tournedos of barley,’ ‘the fresh mint on a wet green melon’—become divine, while the divine is humbled and humanized. More than flight, what Icarus remembers is his ‘cat purring in a stand of reeds, my father sleeping with his hands on his face.’ Mormoris reminds us of how ‘necessary it is to lose yourself in tangles,’ in the beauty that surrounds us, no matter where we look.”

Stelios Mormoris is a widely published poet, author, and CEO of SCENT BEAUTY, Inc. A dual citizen of Greece and the United States, Mormoris was born in New York and spent most of his life living in Paris. He has held positions on the Boards of the French Cultural Center of Boston, New England, The Fragrance Foundation, SYMRISE, ACT-UP, and is a member of Kytherian Society of Greece.

Order a copy of The Oculus here. Keep up to date with Mormoris’ work and the upcoming publishing of Perishable here.

Spring Fever by Thomas Legendre

October 6, 2023February 9, 2024Superstition Review

Thomas Legendre recently published Spring Fever, a quantum romantic techno-thriller novel with a literary sensibility.

The book is set in London and Nottingham and follows Amanda Nigh, an employee of HocusLocus who recrafts digital content with viral potential while beta-testing radical new software and enjoying London nightlife. But, she discovers a strange story involving American ice hockey player Craig Merleau, who talks like a European philosopher, inexplicably propelling his team to victory with his cerebral pronouncements. All the while, the world is threatened by a subatomic virus that affects computers and humans in bizarre ways. While global networks run awry and everyone struggles with quantum superposition and gravity quakes, Amanda and Craig remain blissfully untouched and attempt to avert technological and biological Armageddon.

“Strangely enough, I started writing Spring Fever before COVID-19, mainly as a way of addressing the rift or gap between our everyday experience and the imperceptible world described by quantum physics, which in some ways corresponds to the gap between appearance and reality that underlies so much of social media. This really was a vexation of mine. I’m not normal. But then of course the pandemic had a huge effect. Suddenly my research on viruses and related issues was in the mainstream and I could draw from the daily news instead of articles on JSTOR. And social media went absolutely bonkers with everyone trapped at home. It was eerie in many ways, a bit like writing about a naval disaster a few months before the Titanic,” Legendre told Jamie McGarry of Valley Press.

Thomas Legendre is a fiction writer, with published works including Keeping Time, The Burning (longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing) and Double Jeopardy. He has also written Half Life, a play performed as part of NVA’s art installation in conjunction with the National Theatre of Scotland, and a radio drama entitled Dream Repair for BBC4. He is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham.

Spring Fever is available from Valley Press. Visit Legendre’s YouTube channel to hear readings of different excerpt from Spring Fever. Read more about Thomas Legendre here.

Jenny Wu’s Continued Success

October 4, 2023September 28, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Jenny Wu on her various exhibitions and projects!

This fall, Jenny is holding a solo exhibition: Otherly. Otherly includes abstract sculptural paintings by Jenny Wu. The exhibition title, referring to the state of being something else, embodies many facets of Wu’s work. As physical objects, they expand the traditional limitations of painting as two-dimensional, resulting in a novel medium that defies categorization. As visual images, her work is alternately reminiscent of op art, colorfield painting, landscape imagery, quilt making, or weaving, yet it is none of these. Thematically, Wu’s titles allude to notions of otherness, due to ethnicity, political differences, or personal histories.

Wu transforms paint from a flat medium to a palpable, malleable material. She pours paint, slices through its layers, and then manipulates these cross-sections to create sculptural compositions on wood panels. Once sealed within a thick, smooth resin coating, they call to mind a timeless permanence.

Wu’s use of paint layers stems from intriguing personal experiences. These include the adding and scraping away layers of paint while making traditional landscape painting a decade ago. The layers upon layers of posters she saw while visiting Rome also inform the process. The work also comments on the increasing use of technology in understanding art, where x-rays routinely expose under paintings and sketches in long-studied paintings. Wu exposes every step and layer of her creative process, but without technology and while rendering the original poured painting unrecognizable. The resulting patterns display repeated but subtly changing timelines of her process, measuring change and progress over time and coalescing into new, cohesive wholes.

The exhibition will be held September 25 – October 23, 2023 at the Widener Gallery, Austin Arts Center. Trinity College, 300 Summit St, Hartford, CT. Gallery hours are Mon-Fri 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sat. 1-5 p.m.

Wu in attendance at Bowery’s Gallery’s Juried Competition with Teresa Jade Jarzynski

This summer was full of excitement for Jenny. She attended Bowery’s Gallery’s 32nd Annual Juried Competition, juried by David Cohen, alongside her friend Teresa Jade Jarzynski, whose painting was featured in the show. Additionally, Elephant Exchange or Whatever, a latex paint and resin on wood panel work, was selected by Lauren Nye to be part of Adams Count Arts Council’s 19th Annual Juried Art Exhibition. It was on display at the Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College and it won best of show. Jenny also recently became president for Touchstone Foundation for The Arts (TFA), a nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization created by the artists of Touchstone Gallery to increase their engagement with the community around them.

Jenny’s latex paint and resin on wood panel work Magically Found $768,000,000,000 was acquired by University of Maryland, College Park through its Contemporary Art Purchasing Program (CAPP). The work will be on view through Sept. 30, 2023 in What We Do After: CAPP New Arrivals 2023, at the University of Maryland’s Stamp Gallery. The exhibition will also feature work from six other artists.

Jenny also has many upcoming projects.

From Sept. 5-Oct. 12, 2023, Jenny will be featured at the 45th Harper College National Juried Exhibition; Harper College, Palatine IL. From Sept. 1-30, 2023, Jenny will be showcased at CT Women Artists 2023 National Open Juried Show, Barnes-Franklin Gallery; Tunxis Community College, Farmington, CT.

On Feb. 17, 2024, Jenny will co-present Pedagogy and Community at the CAA annual conference in Chicago. She also has another solo exhibition It Depends with Morton Fine Art in Feb., 2024. The reception for the exhibition is scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 24, 2-4 p.m.

We are so proud of Jenny and all that she is up to.

View 5 paintings by Jenny in issue 30 of Superstition Review.

Learn more about Jenny and her upcoming events here.

Brandel France De Bravo’s Locomotive Cathedral

October 2, 2023September 30, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Brandel France De Bravo on her upcoming book.

Bravo’s collection of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, was chosen for honorable mention and a $1,000 prize in the Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry contest—an imprint of the University of Nebraska. The collection will be published in early 2025.

Contest judge Hilda Raz, editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press, commented on Locomotive Cathedral, “I was delighted by the wit of the speaker, her refusal to be downed by the isolation and grief caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as drug and AIDs deaths she remembers, and cancer.”

“I am thrilled to be joining the Backwaters Press and University of Nebraska family!” said France de Bravo. “Transformation is a recurring theme in Locomotive Cathedral. I’m delighted that these poems, which explore the very human desire for permanence and control in a world of ceaseless flux, spoke to judge Hilda Raz.”

This year, Brandel also had the opportunity to serve as a contemplative coach to a Dalai Lama Fellow.

A second-generation Washingtonian, Brandel has served on the Board of PEN Mexico for three years and serves on the Board of the National Center for Health Research. She is a mentor through the Mexican nonprofit Jovenes Adelante and a certified instructor of Compassion Cultivation Training. A poet, author of numerous nonfiction pieces and essays, and translator, Brandel is the author of Mother, Loose (Accents Publishing) and Provenance (Washington Writers’ Publishing House). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, and elsewhere.

View Brandel’s poem in issue 29 of Superstition Review. Learn more about Brandel here.

Jenny Marie Day’s Upcoming Exhibitions

September 22, 2023September 21, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Jenny Marie Day on her assorted projects.

Jenny has upcoming solo exhibitions this winter featuring paintings and sculptures with Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, Alabama and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jenny also has recent and upcoming artist residencies with Greenwich House Pottery in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado.

Since 2022, Day’s work has also been included in solo and group exhibitions with Galerie Bengelstrater in Islehorn, Dusseldorf, and Cologne, Germany; Visons West in Denver, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana; William Havu Gallery in Colorado, Form and Concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and many other venues.

Day’s practice has expanded to new mediums, including acrylic on canvas paintings; ceramic; mixed media; and textile sculptures.

Jenny Day is a painter and sculptor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Arizona, a BFA in Painting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz. Her exhibition record includes Arte Laguna in Venice, Italy; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea; Museum of Art Fort Collins; Mesa Arts Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; Blue Star Contemporary Museum in San Antonio, TX; Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, AL; and Elmhurst Museum in Chicago, IL. Day’s work has been supported by an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, a Barron Purchase Award and ongoing support from The Process Museum. Day has participated at Greenwich House Pottery, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Playa Foundation For The Arts, among other artist residencies. Jenny Day is represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana; Visions West in Denver, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana; and Galerie Bengelstrater in Dusseldorf, Germany.

View Jenny’s paintings essays in issue 19 and issue 29 of Superstition Review and hear Jenny discuss her issue 19 paintings and artistic backgrounds in her feature on the Superstition Review blog’s Authors Talk series.

Jenny’s work can be purchased through Galerie Bengelsträter, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, or Visions West. Learn more about Jenny and her works here.

Sarah Beth Childers, Prodigals

September 18, 2023September 14, 2023Superstition Review

Congratulations to SR Contributor Sarah Beth Childers on her forthcoming book, Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss.

Prodigals is a series of lyric essays of loss and resistance told in the voice of an Appalachian storyteller.

The book examines how Childers’ brother’s story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the familiar story of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences. Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountains. The Childers family’s fervent religious faith and resistance to medical intervention seems normal in this environment, as is their conflicting desires to both escape from Appalachia and to stay forever at home.

Prodigals weaves in the stories of other famous prodigals, including the alcoholic brother of the Brontë sisters, Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen televangelist; Robert Crumb, her brother’s beloved author of racist and sexist comic books; and Childers herself. The story examines the role of prodigals within the intimate tapestry of family life and beyond—to its larger sociocultural meanings.

Read some of the book’s reviews:

“An Appalachian childhood steeped in Pentecostalism, the Brontë siblings roaming the English moors, the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son: Sarah Beth Childers’ memoir triangulates between these and more. From the outset, it raises the question of who the prodigal is—the younger brother Childers loved and lost, too young, to mental illness, or Childers herself, who left West Virginia and her insular family to become a writer and professor. In prose that’s full of swerves and surprises, Childers tells and retells her brother’s story. This telling is an act of loving retrieval—even a kind of return. Riveting, luminous, memorable. I’ve read it three times and can’t wait to begin again.” — Jennifer Brice, author of Unlearning to Fly and Another North.

“Prodigals is about the author’s grief as she explores—via memory, via writing, and via time—her brother Joshua’s mental illness and his loss. She came from a family that did not ascribe names and diagnoses to mental illness, no less Joshua’s, and she must not only find a variety of definitions for loss, love, and relationship but also for herself. This is a journey of self, intellect, and history, toward understanding.” —Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance.

“A gorgeous meditation on family, place, and loss. In revisiting the life of her beloved brother, Sarah Beth Childers insists on bearing witness to people and places as they are while contemplating those who stay and those who leave, and the wide pulsing spaces left in their wake. Captivating and clear-sighted. A beautiful book.” —Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread.

Sarah Beth Childers is the author of Shake Terribly the Earth as well as numerous publications in literary journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University and lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

View the creative nonfiction essay “Beagle in the Road” by Sarah Beth Childers in issue 20 of Superstition Review.

Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss, released on September 1 from the University of Georgia Press’s Crux Series in Creative Nonfiction. Purchase the book here.