
AWP Member Bookshelf
Members are invited to list their new and forthcoming books on our AWP Member Bookshelf. Listings will also appear in an issue of the Writer's Chronicle and on our Bookshop.org affiliate page when available. Books added ahead of their publication date will receive a special Pub Day shoutout on AWP’s social media pages. To add your book, fill out our submission form.
New and Forthcoming Books by AWP Members
Maximum Speed  by Kevin Clouther
11/15/2023
“With meticulous craft and profound compassion, Clouther conjures this vibrant collection of connected stories of friends wrestling the ghosts of their past. Balancing heart and humor, Maximum Speed bears witness to the raw hope of youth and the bittersweet wisdom of age.” —Frances de Pontes Peebles
Transitory  by Subhaga Crystal Bacon
11/14/2023
Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.
Heading North  by Holly M. Wendt
11/07/2023
For fans of The Art of Fielding and the Beartown series, Heading North follows a gay professional ice hockey player rebuilding his life after tragedy while his general manager wrestles for team control amid a deteriorating marriage. Anne Valente calls it "Sharply written and beautifully moving."
the matchstick litanies  by jo reyes-boitel
11/01/2023
Blending poetic memoir and revelation, the matchstick litanies opens on family violence and women’s work. These richly-detailed poems, however, reclaim the voice of a speaker who excavates family stories. jo’s poems refuse to look away and finds that sometimes fire can create a path.
Night Wing over Metropolitan Area  by John Hoppenthaler
10/31/2023
"I needed these poems from John Hoppenthaler. There is so much beauty in his poems, but no sentimentality. There is raw feeling, but it has purpose and provides service for our rattled hearts." Rosanne Cash Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter
The In-Betweeners  by Khem K. Aryal
10/24/2023
Timely. Relevant. Deeply felt. Aryal’s The In-Betweeners presents a deeply human perspective on the travails—and triumphs—of a group of Nepalese immigrants in the U.S. The stories reveal the heartrending ambivalence of not being part of a new culture while being unable to return to the old.
All That Rises  by Alma Garcia
10/17/2023
All That Rises introduces us to a refreshing new voice in Latinx literature. With empathy and grace, Alma García has mapped the borderlands in a bold new way....A novel of stark originality populated by characters whose lives readers won’t easily forget.” —Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints
Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir  by Alexandra Teague
10/15/2023
In these quirky and richly told tales, Alexandra Teague brings readers along for the wild ride of her youth, traversing wide swaths of the American landscape in the company of a talking puppet, Victorian ghosts, and a family fueled by fantasy, dysfunction, and fierce love.
Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood's Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss  by Margaret Anne Mary Moore
10/02/2023
After a normal pregnancy, Margaret Margaret ("Meg"), was born with Cerebral Palsy and relies on a wheelchair, walker, and speech device. Meg narrates her childhood experiences pursuing regular education and activities such as Girl Scouts, soccer, and ice-skating despite these challenges.
QUIET TREE  by DM Frech
09/22/2023
QUIET TREE is a poetry chapbook for dismantled souls in search of truth through swamp lands and passages with God. DM Frech has a BFA and MFA in dance from New York University, performed throughout NYC and since then has been a writer of poetry, fiction, children's stories and so on.
Worn Smooth between Devourings  by Lauren Camp
09/19/2023
The poems in Worn Smooth between Devourings travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion.
Dominus  by Tiffany Troy
09/18/2023
Dominus, Tiffany Troy’s poetry debut, fuses post-confessional bildungsroman with a toxicology report of American ambition. As insistent on justice as it is baffled by its own hope, Dominus shows us there’s beauty in caring for each other, so as to never let anyone “kill the love in [our] hearts.”
Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival  by JoeAnn Hart
09/15/2023
Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival won the 2022 Hudson Prize. In this collection of short fiction, characters struggle with Covid, ecological destruction, and grief as they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is not always in a position to give back.
Lady Ref: Making Calls in a Man's World  by Shannon Eastin and Kate St. Vincent Vogl
09/13/2023
The eye-opening and inspiring memoir of Shannon Eastin, the first female official for the NFL. "This is an interesting first-person account, written with a skilled coauthor, by a talented, complicated woman and sports figure." - Booklist
Who Killed Marta Ugarte? Poems in memory of the victims of Augusto Pinochet  by Jeanne-Marie Osterman
09/11/2023
Jeanne-Marie Osterman's searing poems capture the horrors of the Pinochet regime's crimes against humanity: the secret detention camps; the vicious torture; the sordid mechanisms of disappearance. Her verses remind us all that we must never forget. Hers is indeed "the poetry of witness."
Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature  by Jennifer Lang
09/05/2023
When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn't perfect. Both 23, both Jewish, they're different: she's a secular tourist, he's an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks, they marry.
THINE  by Kate Partridge
09/01/2023
THINE explores shifting iterations of the poetic self within the context of rapidly changing landscapes in the American West. The book’s observational approach draws together ecopoetics with art and myth, turning a skeptical eye toward predictions of both apocalypse and hope.
The Gentle Art: Poems  by William Wenthe
08/16/2023
THE GENTLE ART contends with the beautiful art and troublesome life of the painter James McNeill Whistler. "Wenthe is engaged in a startling fusion wherein the painter and the poet become mirror-like illuminations of each other. THE GENTLE ART is painful, gorgeous, and wise." —Rick Barot
A New Kind of Tongue  by Genevieve Betts
07/26/2023
As a collection, Genevieve Betts’ A New Kind of Tongue includes poems that are sometimes quirky, sometimes lyrical, sometimes edgy, and sometimes humorous. Language—our understanding of it, its regionality, and its many intricacies—is a main theme rooted within the book’s strong sense of place.
My Neglected Gods  by Joanne Nelson
07/25/2023
We all have our rituals and talismans to protect us from the unknown, but will we admit what they are? Tarot cards, speeding cars, several saints, and old dogs make appearances in Joanne Nelson’s humorous and heartfelt collection.
Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation  by editors Rachel Neve-Midbar and Jennifer Saunders
07/19/2023
In Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation, 110 writers from around the world and across gender orientations report back from that most taboo site - the bleeding body. In poetry and prose, these writers put language to the full range of menstrual experience in its pain, shame, and joy.
The Proprietor's Song  by Janet Goldberg
07/04/2023
“Goldberg's poetic descriptions of Death Valley, its alluring and treacherous landscape, set the tone for The Proprietor’s Song, a subtle novel about grief, mortality, hope, and despair.”—Fredrick Soukup, author of Bliss and Blood Up North.
The Apartment  by Ana Menendez
06/27/2023
"A dazzling inquiry into the disquietudes of time and place... Menéndez's exquisitely-wrought stories—emanating from the lifespan of one modest Miami apartment—offer us no less than the world. A masterful, poetic achievement." -Cristina Garcia
An Eye in Each Square  by Lauren Camp
06/20/2023
With the gifts of a visual artist and poet’s attention, An Eye in Each Square confronts our era’s barbed and shifting networks of power and atrocities. Lauren Camp’s sixth collection of poetry offers social critique within an imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin.
Direct Sunlight: Stories  by Christine Sneed
06/15/2023
"Christine Sneed's inimitable eye for detail, beautiful writing, hauntingly complex characters, and trademark humor shine in these brilliant, moving stories. Direct Sunlight is everything a short-story collection should be." --J. Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
Writing That Gets Noticed: Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, Get Published  by Estelle Erasmus
06/13/2023
Estelle Erasmus, a journalist and writing professor at NYU and host of the Freelance Writing Direct podcast has published a valuable resource for beginning and advanced writers, that includes stories from her life. The Publishers Weekly review recommends writers and readers "Buy this Book".
Murmurations  by Andrea Rinard
06/06/2023
In twenty-five short stories, Andrea Rinard introduces an eclectic group of women attempting to claim their own space and to find meaning in the mundanity of relationships, eating, shopping, grieving, searching, and dropping a kid off at college.
Almost Brown  by Charlotte Gill
06/06/2023
“Almost Brown is that rarest of things: a memoir that is both deeply intimate and intellectually ambitious. It fearlessly examines race and the issue of belonging, and at the same time is a tender, touching, often very funny tale of growing up and finding your way." --Susan Orlean
The Garden of Second Chances  by Mona Alvarado Frazier
06/06/2023
Juana, a 17-year-old mother, is imprisoned for killing her husband. To save herself and her child, she must prove her innocence. Undocumented and alone, she creates a refuge in the prison yard, a garden. Her only hope is to trust in the strength of her mother's legacy and fight for the truth.
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea  by Rita Chang-Eppig
05/30/2023
For readers of Outlawed, Piranesi, and The Night Tiger, a dazzling historical novel about a legendary Chinese pirate queen, her fight to save her fleet from the forces allied against them, and the dangerous price of power.
The Book of Redacted Paintings  by Arthur Kayzakian
05/26/2023
There is both hunger and wisdom in these poems, both silence inside the singing and the fresh music out of rooms that might have been silenced once. Not anymore! The new, original, inimitable poet is in the room. Kayzakian deserves our warmest welcome—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa.
Sane Asylum  by Allison Whittenberg
05/23/2023
A poignant work of speculative fiction, Sane Asylum, is an examination of love, war and the politics that dominates our lives. During his next mission, Coop is blinded in battle and returns to Lucy's home only to find it strangely more unsettling than the battlefront.
ALICE THE CAT  by Tim Cummings
05/23/2023
“The writing of an angel with the imagination of the devil. Alice the Cat slinked inside me, furtively, magnificently. My heart ached for Tess—so much loss. My heart thundered for her too—so much sass. This book is nothing short of bliss.” –Caroline Thompson, writer of The Nightmare Before Christmas
Someday I Will Not Be Ashamed  by Lori Lynne Armstrong
05/20/2023
A former academic and counselor shares an inspirational and searingly authentic woman's story that blends raw honesty with clinical knowledge in a journey through and beyond addictions, mental illness, and self-destructive shame.
American Scapegoat  by Enzo Silon Surin
05/19/2023
American Scapegoat is a book of painstakingly honest and chilling poems about America’s neglectful relationship with its own history and fosters a deeply essential conversation about what it means to be Black and American in a democracy at war with itself and its humanity.