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“Deep Gossip is beautiful and true, and alive with love, as life itself. The magnificence of Sidney Wade’s vision is unmatched in American Poetry.” —Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
From the publisher: Throughout her seven critically acclaimed collections, Sidney Wade has established herself as a poet with a serious but light touch, capable of the clarity and inventiveness it takes to work a problem to both pleasure and resolution. Inspired by landscape, language, music, and living things, as well as the occasional bout of political outrage, Deep Gossip is a smart collection.
Sidney Wade is a poet, translator, and professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Florida. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Bird Book, Straits & Narrows, Stroke, Celestial Bodies, Empty Sleeves, Green, and From Istanbul/İstanbul’dan. Her poems “Byzantium” and “Barn” appeared in NER 17.4.
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[De Jarnatt’s] stories . . . have violence at their centers and are richly textured—the prose being ornate, rococo, thickly detailed.” —Janice Obuchowski, author of “Constellations” and “Mountain Shade”
From the publisher: Grace for Grace brings celebrated cult filmmaker Steve De Jarnatt’s distinctive voice and cinematic vision to the page. Lush inner lives, idiosyncratic syntax, and sweeping scale characterize these wildly imaginative stories, which present characters in search of meaning and belonging, and often, at the same time, redemption and revenge.
Steve De Jarnatt‘s fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Short Stories, among others. He has worked as a writer, director, and producer in film and television for three decades, most notably writing and directing the cult classic Miracle Mile. His fiction includes two stories in NER, “Wraiths in Swelter” (NER 36.2) and “Her Great Blue” (NER 34.1).
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“The queen is back with the exact novel we need in this fraught era. A powerful testament of witness and humanity written with audacity and authority.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
From the publisher: The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves, but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. Alvarez’s essay “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical” appeared in NER 21.4.
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The Age of Phillis is the finest work on early African-American life I’ve ever read . . . This is a book to be taught, studied, held, absorbed, and treasured.” —Joanna Brooks, author of American Lazarus and Why We Left
From the publisher: In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet whose work examines culture, religion, history, and family. She is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Glory Gets, and the recipient of the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is a professor of English. Her fiction “Soon One Morning” appears in NER 25.4.
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We are excited to announce that several NER authors will be featured in the Best American Poetry 2020. The anthology, curated by guest editor Paisley Rekdal and series editor David Lehman, is set to be released September 8, 2020. 