Thank you to Solstice Magazine for publishing Susan Rich’s powerful essay on her experience with coerced abortion and how writing her latest collection of poems helped her heal.
News & Review Type: News
Must-Read Essay by Susan Rich, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now” featured in Solstice Magazine
Chicago Review of Books Welcomes DEAR EDNA SLOANE’S Amy Shearn as Resident Author
Follow along as Amy Shearn posts a photo on Chicago Review of Books’ Instagram page every day leading up to the release of DEAR EDNA SLOANE on April 30.
DRUMMING WITH DEAD CAN DANCE author and musician Peter Ulrich returns to the Curious Creatures Podcast for part 2
In this Episode Lol and Budgie talk to Peter Ulrich about ‘The Need and The Desire to Hold Things Together!’
The Campaign for the American reader interviews THE GOOD DEED author Helen Benedict
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?
I think titles are of utmost importance to the writer and the reader. For the writer, they serve to distill, even if subliminally, what the book is actually about and even its mood and point of view, so it’s essential to get it right. If the title is ironic or funny, that sets an inescapable tone for the whole book. Likewise, if the title is poetic, quirky, funny, weird, surreal, or deadly earnest. For the reader, the title signals all that and more because basically it’s calling out, “See how intriguing I am? Read me!”
BLUE ATLAS author Susan Rich interviewed by Solstice Literary Magazine
Susan Rich’s masterful collection, Blue Atlas, (Red Hen Press, April 2, 2024) is a physical and emotional travelogue through a “land of deferred decisions.” In this collection, the reader is taken on a journey from North America to Europe to Africa, from the “before and after,” with a speaker grounded in a decision made 30 years ago. There is a wonderment when the speaker asks, “What can I do with the women who occupy my vertebrae, // take over my hips and tongue?”
I asked Susan about lineage, about politics, and about writing the body.
TRACE by Brenda Cárdenas wins Midland Authors Award for poetry
April 15, 2024 — The Society of Midland Authors today announced its annual awards, honoring its choices for the best books by Midwest authors published in 2023. In each category, a panel of literary judges chose a winner as well as one or more honorees whose work was also deemed worthy of recognition. The winners and honorees will be recognized at an awards dinner on May 21 in Chicago.
LIKE WINGS, YOUR HANDS author Elizabeth Earley navigates religious trauma in an article on Advocate magazine
I was listening to NPR, watching my kids swim in the bay, their shining heads bobbing in the light-studded water when I heard the news about the tragic death of Nex Benedict. I felt grief and a sadly familiar hand of fear pressing down on my chest.
I searched the Internet to see if it related to religion, and it did, but not in the way I expected.
Utah Public Radio interviews GHOST APPLES author Katharine Coles
In her ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet. From her own pet parrot, Henri, to the birds her husband attracts to their feeders, to the wildlife who live just outside—and regularly cross—her property on the wild edge of Salt Lake City, she uses her capacity for intense observation and meditation to think her way into other lives and possible shared futures, both good and bad.
Listen to DRUMMING WITH DEAD CAN DANCE author Peter Ulrich on the Curious Creatures Podcast
In this Episode Lol and Budgie talk to Peter Ulrich about ‘Creating Life Out of Dead Things!’
Harvard University features MONKEY BUSINESS author Carleton Eastlake with others for a virtual discussion on writing mystery on April 25th, 5:30 PT
Join us for a mysterious, thrilling, and even downright terrifying Harvardwood Author Series event! Learn how to craft suspense and have your readers clutching their pearls with every page turn. Join us for a conversation with authors Camille Cabrera ALM ’23, Carleton Eastlake JD ’72, Kemper Donovan JD ’04 about writing mystery novels and creating intrigue in story!
Largehearted Boy features article, “Helen Benedict’s playlist for her novel THE GOOD DEED”!
“At heart, the novel is not only about the hardship of becoming a refugee, and the imbalance of power between the privileged and the destitute, it is about love.”
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Helen Benedict’s The Good Deed is a heartrending and compelling novel about the modern refugee crisis.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The novel comes to an emotional conclusion, reminding us that hope is still to be found in the most desolate of places and prompting the reader to consider why and how we ask a person to prove their own humanity. An insightful reminder of our responsibilities to one another, more important now than ever.”
Snowflakes in a Blizzard blog features Helen Benedict’s THE GOOD DEED!
SUMMARY: Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret. When the tourist does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.
One of my favorite descriptions of the novel comes from Iranian author Dalia Sofer, who wrote the brilliant, Man of My Time. “A poignant, layered novel on displacement and belonging, love and betrayal, and the jagged space between altruism and egoism.”
THE BACK STORY: I decided to write The Good Deed in 2018, when I spent five weeks with refugees on the island of Samos, in Greece. I was so horrified by the conditions they lived amidst in this otherwise beautiful place — their camp was like a slum inside a prison — and yet so moved by the resilience and kindness of the people I met, that I felt compelled to write articles and a nonfiction book exposing their plight, and a novel doing the same in aneven deeper way.
WHY THIS TITLE?: The story basically turns the white savior trope inside-out, so the title is ironic but also literal.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Because it’s a story about people’s courge in the face of hardship, a story about friendship, about love, and about lives very far from the experiences of many readers — lives we all need to understand better. But also because it’s sweeping, dramatic and sometimes funny book!
Susan Rich discusses her collection, BLUE ATLAS, on 1455 Author Series!
It’s a tradition that began last year, and I hope we repeat every year: making sure we properly acknowledge National Poetry Month by celebrating the work of an amazing contemporary poet! Just like last year (check out our conversation here), I had the extraordinary pleasure of chatting with Susan Rich, show remarkable new collection Blue Atlas is now available. (As always, we are proud to support independent booksellers, and encourage you to pick up your copies via our friends at The Potter’s House.)
I encourage you to enjoy the recorded conversation, below, but a few words of praise, which I’m at once obliged and honored to share.
Throughout the collection we see both the power and purpose of metaphor: the necessity of it, especially for locating or discussing things that otherwise often die in silence. It’s immediately evident we are in the capable hands (and mind, and heart) of an expert, and works like Blue Atlas –aside from the aesthetic joys they induce– serve to increase awareness; no one can read these poems and come away from the experience unchanged. Work this frank and affecting is an empathy generator: I am convinced stories being told equip others to speak — and move the needle, however gradually, in a necessary direction: toward truth, away from silence.
This, to be certain, is deeply personal work, but it also manages what rare art achieves: it fuses the personal and political, with words (and metaphors!!) that render the expression universal in the best sense; these are poems only this poet could write; they are poems everyone can (and should) read. As I prepared for our discussion last night I happened to see the breaking news out of Arizona, and it was a very unnecessary, but unavoidable reminder that work like Susan’s could hardly be more timely, relevant, essential. Please read and share this book.
John Barr’s THE BOXER OF QUIRINAL receives PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection!
PEN America is honored to announce the Longlists for the 2024 Literary Awards. Our Awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning authors, editors, translators, and critics. These authors are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, from promising debut writers to those who have had a continuous, lasting impact on the literary landscape.
The 2024 Literary Awards will confer over $350,000 to writers and translators. Spanning fiction, poetry, translation, and more, these Longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.
Finalists for the following awards will be announced before the ceremony. Stay tuned for more and join us at the 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony on April 29!
Please note that the following awards will be announced on a different timeline: PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, PEN Open Book Award, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Canadian Family Offices features interview with Jennifer Risher, author of WE NEED TO TALK: A MEMOIR ABOUT WEALTH!
Jennifer Risher talks about her liquidity event and how sudden wealth affected her friendships and personal stewardship
Jennifer Risher was in her late twenties when she and her husband, David, came into sudden money. As employees of Microsoft, they had earned millions through stock options, and then in 1997 David joined a pre-IPO Amazon.com Inc. as a senior executive.
Having come from a middle-class upbringing, the couple faced challenges in navigating the emotional complexities of sudden wealth. In her book We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth, Jennifer chronicles her experiences on the way to becoming an educated and empowered investor and philanthropist who is also making an impact through #HalfMyDAF, a charitable giving initiative she established with her husband. She is also an in-demand speaker committed to fostering meaningful conversations about money.
Jennifer was an engaging guest on my podcast Serious Coin, and in the interview below, we explore her initial feelings of embarrassment about wealth, the impact on her friendships and her advice for others who are new to wealth.
Kelly Willis Green: Was there a moment when you realized that you had a lot of money?
Jennifer Risher: Yes and no. Because there’s the mental realization – the intellectual view of a bunch of numbers and imagining what that means – and then there’s actually believing it. That takes a lot longer. Even then, it was hard to really realize it. But my discomfort started to come out in me as I was trying to hide from our wealth.
Tell me about a time when you tried to hide the fact you had money.
I really felt it when there was this juxtaposition between two massive events in my life. First, having this money accumulating and getting bigger than I would have imagined, and also becoming a parent.
Right before I had my first daughter, David left Microsoft and joined Amazon, and then that company went public, right as I was giving birth, basically (laughs). There was a difference in the feeling of those two events. It was kind of profound because with becoming a mom, I was blown away by all the love and the emotion. I was also a member of a mothers’ group, and all of us were experiencing the same kind of ups and downs. I’d meet with this group, but I was also trying to hide something big that was going on in my life.