Take a minute to scroll through the delightful offerings in ArtsMart, and you’ll find fascinating books on every subject, for every taste, and from every genre--poetry, memoirs, history and biography, children’s books, essays, mysteries, fiction both speculative and historical. You’ll also find writing workshops and retreats, music, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and mood.



When you purchase an item from ArtsMart, you are helping Persimmon Tree fulfill its mission of providing an audience for the writing and art of women over 60. ArtsMart’s advertising rates are purposely set very low in order to afford to as many older women writers and artists the opportunity to connects with potential purchasers.

Persimmon Tree is an Amazon and Bookshop.org associate, which means our journal receives a small royalty every time you make a purchase by clicking through to Amazon or Bookshop.org. The price to you is no higher, but your purchase helps Persimmon Tree continue its vital work.

 
Immigrants fearful of losing the only home they’ve known. Communities divided by politics. A neighborhood becoming gentrified with some benefiting and others being harmed. Sound familiar?

It is 1971 in the fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, and three young couples are facing these and other challenges that will have a profound effect on them as they navigate life in an urban community.

The Talking Drum is the winner of a Shelf Unbound Indie Book Award, a National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Literary Award, IPPY gold medal in Urban Fiction, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and an International Book Award.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or your independent bookstore.

London Sojourn is a bibliophile’s dream and offers avid readers a delicious outsider’s perspective on moving abroad using a literary lens. 

Burned out from a career in academia, lifelong Anglophile and retiree Rebecca Knuth moves to London seeking reinvention, only to become transformed. 

To fulfill her dream of writing creative nonfiction, Rebecca enrolls in a two-year writing course at City University. More important, Rebecca discovers how thoroughly the mores of the twentieth century silenced women writers. She seizes her chance to give them voice in her thesis, determined to be heard herself.

A charming, heartfelt, educational, and brave story for creatives, retirees, seekers, writers, readers, and dreamers.

“Intriguing, introspective, and densely packed with historical and observational factoids.”−Kirkus Reviews

Learn more at rebeccaknuth.com

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance coloring book and 2026 calendar are both great gifts for women, girls, dance lovers, and those who love them.

Veteran New York City dance photographer Julie Lemberger created this unique coloring book based on her photography, to celebrate innovative, entrepreneurial, and steadfast women dance artists. Have fun and relax coloring images of women who dance. An admirer remarked: “A lovely and poignant book. Made with love and reverence.”

The products feature dance artists Wendy Whelan, Yoshiko Chuma, Michelle Dorrance, Hope Boykin, Eiko Otake, Netta Yarushalmy, Urban Bush Women, and many more.

The coloring book offers 90 pages of personalities to get to know, biographies, and even a glossary of dance terms for the 21st century. The calendar, also a coloring book, offers 12 distinct women to brighten each month of 2026.

For more about the artist: julielemberger.com.

Available at etsy.com/shop/dancecoloringbook.

In Snakeberry Mamas Mary Alice Dixon’s words from the wild conjure an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. From the crossroads of Witcher Way Holler to the waters of Hungry River, these poems carry you into a magic world of owl-women, dandelion girls, and the memories of dead mothers alive in the heartwood of trees. In these liminal places grief makes knife blades of red pickled eggs; a goddess offers salvation in tongue of fire; a hellfire-and-brimstone suffragette shares a recipe for britches with balls. Mary Alice Dixon makes poetry that muses mountains and maps gardens you will never want to leave.

www.maryalicedixon.com.

Available from CharlotteLit (the literary and artistic center of Charlotte, NC)

Women in 1842 had little voice and no role model, as theirs was the first convoy of wagons containing families heading to Oregon City. They were led by a devious man with a government appointment to take people west, who was challenged by a dangerous man who wrested control of the wagon train: but the women had no say in the decisions by men.

Lamentations, however, gives the dozen women on the trail their own voice: there is the lady from Missouri whose child dies; there is the woman from New York, too old probably to make the trip but alert to every facet of the new and changing landscape; there is the reticent woman from Virginia, a healer despite her young age; and the woman from Georgia whose painful past haunts her.

At the center of the novel are the three daughters of a couple who hope to run the first newspaper in Pacific Northwest. There is Martha who wants only to return East, Ellen who keeps a Family Observation of the journey, and Jane, the middle daughter, the one who stutters but can sing.

The novel is based upon real events, upon the field notes kept by the company clerk, and on the notes that one of the women was instructed to keep, for everyone knew they were making history, the women as well as the men. This is their story.

Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

 
This debut novel provides a wonderful sense of 1970’s New York City. Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, squalid six floor walk-ups and posh co-ops, streets crowded with hustlers and cabbies, all come to life. The bars Michelle frequents have characters right out of central casting. The reader becomes submerged in the sights, sounds, and smells of NYC.

Beck-Clark does a great job of tackling weighty topics in a way that inspires introspection without detracting from the narrative flow. Given the exploration of trauma, it might not always be a comfortable read, but it is an important one. – Erin Britton, San Francisco Book Review


The novel’s plotlines are excellently woven throughout, and the novel’s narrative moves ever forward, with several twists and turns maintaining the interest of the reader. The characters are fully developed as the reader gains a large measure of intimacy with them, identifying with their struggles and motives. At the end of the day, Beck-Clark succeeds in spinning a true to life tale of Holocaust memory, trauma, and recovery, that is both sad and inspiring.
– David Keenan, Manhattan Book Review

Available at Amazon.com, B&N, Apple, Bookshop.org, and most booksellers online and in bookstores.

For more information: www.denisebeck-clark.com

How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society?

The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet’s ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accept-ing). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present.

The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satia- tion, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the “need to praise.”

“Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. … [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Available from Alice James Books, Amazon or Bookshop

“Ronnie Hess’s Eggphrasis is a mix of astute and sympathetic observations about her backyard chickens and encounters with wild species, interwoven with her perspectives on life. Her poetry is by turns amusing and poignant, while providing insight into the birds she writes about.” — Anna Pidgeon, Beers-Bascom Professor of Conservation, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Throughout this collection, birds are a delight, a cause for concern, a flock, unique individuals, worthy of attention in and of themselves and for what they sometimes suggest about us humans. These insightful poems present for our regard the narrow and the wide earth and all who find a place here to fly, to walk, to write, and to practice their art.” — Margaret Rozga, author of Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems, and 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

Available from the author, Amazon, or your independent bookstore.

 
 
Spanning four decades, two families, and the ever-changing visitors to a New England coastal town, Summer People is a story of intersecting lives, buried secrets, and unexpected moments of grace.

Catharine Conor and Tom Osborne meet on Harvard’s library steps in the early eighties and fall deeply in love. Tom, struggling with mental health challenges, is expelled after an impulsive act of campus rebellion. Pregnant Catharine follows him to London, where circumstances alter their lives. Eventually settling on the coast of Massachusetts, they purchase an old house and raise a son, Toby. A batch of forgotten letters reveals a poignant connection to the house’s previous owner, whose own son died tragically.

With compassion and complexity, Summer People portrays love’s resilience and the unexpected ways human lives impact each other.

L.H. Finigan’s novel “…may remind readers of…Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio…and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, … given its sweeping presentation of several characters in a small town…An ambitious and affecting interweaving of troubled characters’ lives.” – Kirkus Reviews

Learn more about the author at lhfinigan.com

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
Rosie Sorenson’s award-winning book shines a piercing light on medical error and the power of advocacy. If You’d Only Listen plunges readers into the chaos and confusion that can accompany a critical medical journey. Rosie’s “midwestern tomboy grit” is tested at every turn as she confronts misdiagnoses, communication failures, and a system that often seemed more adversarial than supportive. Through a combination of fierce advocacy, meticulous note-taking, and an unyielding refusal to be ignored, Rosie became her husband Steve’s lifeline—catching errors, asking the hard questions, and refusing to accept vague answers or dismissals.

If You’d Only Listen is not just a memoir—it’s a survival guide for anyone who may one day find themselves fighting for a loved one’s life. The Addendum provides a deep dive into the realities of medical error, the influence of private equity in healthcare, and the pervasive issue of racial bias. Rosie offers practical recommendations for families: how to be an effective advocate, which questions to ask, and how to keep a loved one safe in the hospital.

Rosie’s courage, resilience, and unwavering love remind us that, even in the darkest hours, ordinary people can make an extraordinary difference.

“I don’t know how the author survived all these harrowing events and kept her sanity and sense of humor. She’s one tough cookie,” Robert A. Nozik, M.D., Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Francisco.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Book Passage, and your local independent bookstore.

“The magic of this book is that in a time of global suffering, its author ‘walked to the edge of an old and used up world and hummed a tune of invention.’ Brava!” —Dante Micheaux

“If the beautiful is what delights us, and the sublime is what leaves us awestruck and wanting to kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetry is both beautiful and sublime. From the naked hunger of the heart to the cosmic force of ‘that world none can see —’ this poetry rises and rises, falls and rises, on a magnificent music that challenges death, defies our human cruelty, and is faithful.” –Alicia Ostriker/ Chancellor Academy of American Poets, NY State Poet Laureate, and Persimmon Tree advisor

“Margo Berdeshevsky’s It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat seems to leap up and declare a rhythmic homage to the world, and one is called to gaze into one’s own eyes and see patterns of the past and future — life and death. And when the speaker says, ‘It was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it’ a unique voice pierces us.”–Yusef Komunyakaa/ Pulitzer Prize recipient

Learn more at margoberdeshevsky.com and https://margoberdeshevsky.simplesite.com/

Available at Salmon Poetry Bookshop https://tinyurl.com/43ypnbzr or directly from Salmon co-director: siobhan@salmonpoetry.com

When Tave wakes up alone in the hospital, she barely remembers the car wreck. Far from home, dazed, and despondent, she struggles to face the challenges of her new paralysis—all while worrying about her partner, Les, also severely injured in the accident, now cared for by her homophobic parents who refuse to allow contact. In rehab, Tave relearns life skills and comes to recognize that her future will be completely different from what she’d imagined.

Where will she live? How will she find the help she needs? Can her friends rise to the occasion? Or will she be forced to move back in with her mother, putting up with endless talk of faith healers? Her one beacon of hope is Beth, her physical therapist. But Beth’s relationship problems with her own girlfriend push her toward overinvolvement—and risk damaging both her career and Tave’s recovery.

A story of a spirited young woman gradually discovering her inner strength, and finding a new community, this novel challenges readers’ preconceived notions of disability.

For more about the author: www.barbararidley.com.

Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
Leaving Home at 83 is an intensely personal story yet one shared with thousands of aging women who are wondering whether to move closer to their children and leave their friendships behind or stay in their communities. Readers will see their own questions on these pages and recognize their own fears, insecurities, and uncertainties.

Butler examines the often-unspoken struggle to sustain our autonomy as we age and our conflicted longing for dependency as we become more vulnerable. Both longings are embedded in the desire not to be a burden to those we love.

With its sharp humor and refreshing honesty, this wry account brings a welcome and necessary perspective to the inevitable moment when we end one chapter of our lives and begin whatever comes next.

“…The ensemble of characters is hilarious, jaw-clenching, at times worthy of a Jack Russell Terrier head tilt. Butler’s writing is tender, funny and unequivocally relatable.”
—Karen Lee Erlichman, D.Min, LCSW, psychotherapist, spiritual director, writer and mentor.

Available from Amazon and at www.sandrabutler.net.

 
PWN Writers is a New Jersey-based nonprofit writing organization dedicated to transforming individuals and communities through writing. Our book inc department guides writers through the entire book-writing journey—from initial concept to final publication.

book inc’s Memoir and Novel Incubator programs (beginning January 2026) provide structured support, expert instruction, and a vibrant community of fellow writers who will cheer you across the finish line. Our Book Revision Lab helps you polish your manuscript with targeted feedback and proven revision techniques. Learn more & apply!

PWN Writers also offers accessible six-week workshops in memoir, poetry, flash fiction, creative writing, and more—with winter 2026 classes starting at just $225 (early bird rate ends December 22). Whether you’re just starting or ready to submit, we meet you where you are. Register now!

We believe the arts are essential and offer payment plans and financial assistance to ensure everyone can participate. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, your participation supports our community outreach programs.

Join our welcoming community and find your people—writers who understand your journey and celebrate every word.

Learn more: bookinc.org & pwnwriters.org
Email: pwnwriters@projectwritenow.org

Transform Your Writing Dreams into Reality
PWN Writers & book inc
 

 
A daughter’s story. A mother’s spotlight. A life on stage.
 

Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, the shy only child of a glamorous, eccentric divorcée learns early that life will never be ordinary. From walking in on her mother posing nude for an artist to navigating the unpredictable world of single parenthood long before it was common, her childhood was equal parts bewildering and unforgettable.

In this poignant and witty memoir, Ellen Tovatt Leary reveals how her mother’s flamboyant spirit became both her greatest challenge and her greatest gift—the unlikely force that propelled her toward the theatre. With sharp humor, theatrical anecdotes, and unflinching honesty, she captures the struggles of a diffident child, the drama of a mother who could command applause even in a nursing home, and the triumph of finding her own voice.

A story of resilience, identity, and the complicated bond between mothers and daughters.

The audible version is read by the author. Available from Amazon.

The Resistance Painter is a gripping novel of wartime betrayal and survival. A Globe and Mail and Toronto Star instant best seller, it has been called “timely and timeless” by Janet Sommerville in the Toronto Star and recommended on CBC Books. At the heart of the story beats a question as urgently relevant today as it was eighty-five years ago: How do we live with integrity and compassion in the middle of a war?

The novel introduces us to Jo, a young sculptor in 2010 Toronto who specializes in interviewing dying people in order to make a stylized sculpture for their grave sites. When her new client Stefan tells a life story eerily similar to her grandmother’s wartime history, Jo digs for answers, catapulting the novel back into Warsaw 1939 when her grandmother Irena was a young woman faced with a brutal Nazi occupation.

Irena and her sister Lotka must decide how to survive while helping family, friends and country. Irena joins the Polish resistance and becomes expert at conducting people through the dangerous sewers of Warsaw. Her sister Lotka follows a different path. She becomes a surgical nurse whose skill is respected by occupiers as well as resistors.

Irena survives to become a lauded artist, whose stark, tender paintings hold terrifying secrets, while Jo discovers a voice and a family she never knew she had.

For more about the author: www.kathjonathanauthor.com.

Available from Bookshop, Amazon and your local independent bookstore

 
It took me forty years to write my story. Hundreds of drafts in desk drawers, computers and even in my dreams. The beginning I knew, but the end was lost with my first husband. And I just couldn’t make it up.

After a book deal was offered, I drove my editor crazy with changes. I told her the albatross wasn’t letting go till I got the story right. She threatened to come and tear off the bird’s legs if I touched the copy one more time.

And when it was all done, the book on display in the window of a downtown Helsinki bookstore, my former stepson called for the first time ever.

We need to talk, Niko said, and I learned how wrong I’d been about the things that really mattered.

This is the final, final version of my story.
Unless, of course, Mariam decides to get in touch.

More on www.tualaine.com

 
 
Unflinchingly honest, this collection of anecdotes treats the challenges of aging with clarity and wit. Here, the losses are diluted with laughter, the shiver gives way to a shrug, the OMG to LOL. Readers weary of the “how to” books that promise to reverse the aging process will welcome the dark humor of a self-described narcissist preoccupied with her mortality. From fears of dementia to hearing loss, cosmetic procedures to breast cancer, joint replacement, and heart surgery, the octogenarian author mines the comic potential of her humbling experience of the later years. The witty and sometimes poignant essays in this collection may not silence the ticking of the clock or slow the falling sand of the hourglass, but they are bound to resonate with readers from middle age and beyond.

“A work that is moving, honest, funny and human.”
— Bob Mitchell, best-selling author of 13 books

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble.

Find out more about the author and the book at marydonaldson-evans.com

 
 
Set during the ‘forever wars’ that followed 9/11, The Angle of Falling Light movingly explores the demons that survivors must wrestle with in the wake of tragedy. Beverly Gologorsky brings us a great cast of characters, at their center three working-class women trying to shape lives of their own in a world that seems to promise them nothing but deadening repetition.

Brave and faltering, they face daunting conundrums of love, care, and the pull of freedom. How do we live past the terrible knowledge that we cannot always help those we cherish the most? Are we still entitled to seek happiness? Knowing how easily disaster can strike the vulnerable, how do we dare to take the risks required for a satisfying life? Is such a thing even possible in a society hooked on war, dangerous drugs, and hatred of the ‘other’?

Alongside the unforgettable trio of Nina and her two daughters (the beautiful but heedless Marla and shy, determined Tessa—barely an adult, but forced to pick up the pieces when her home life shatters), we also spend time with Rhonda, an 80-something artist whose struggle to stay independent in the face of physical limitations and family pressure complements Tessa’s quest to become a photographer.

Gologorsky’s unsparing vision of the bleakness so rampant in a nation addicted to combat and inequality only renders more compelling her portraits of these women bound and determined to make a way from no ways.

Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

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“An engaging memoir of life lived to its fullest…” — Kirkus Reviews, The Magazine, October 1, 2025

In this riveting memoir, Claire Kahane unveils her intimate self-transformations over the course of nine decades. Born in the Great Depression to Jewish immigrants and determined to prove herself a free spirit in a male dominated world, Kahane went on the road, hitchhiking her way into and out of risky adventures and romantic affairs.

But what starts out as a “road book” takes a different turn in midlife. In scenes dramatically illustrating the growing influence of psychoanalysis and feminism, she becomes a feminist professor, mother and wife, living out the contradictions she is teaching in the classroom.

In later life her story changes tracks again when a visit to Auschwitz compels her to confront her own family history of Holocaust loss and renewal. The memoir ends with a surprising new twist that opens to a hopeful future.

“Claire Kahane has written a memoir for our times: an account of a life spent in pursuit of lived experience long before it was permissible for women like Kahane to do just that. Rich and lively, vivid and bold, Nine Lives is bound to reach a wide and responsive readership.” —Vivian Gornick, essayist, critic, and author of numerous memoirs, including Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore. A limited number of signed copies are available from Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA.

It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers.

“Indra Kapur writes with clear insight and an acute sense of humor. The stories in A Year Without Men are varied, clever, and often delightfully surprising! Cue me rubbing my hands together with glee.” — Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series.

“The stories in A Year Without Men create a powerful sense of place with rich sensory and emotional detail. Characters are appealing in their humor and the compassion they inspire. I want to meet these people and be there with them! Some endings surprise us, and others give us a satisfying sense of the inevitable playing out. The stories have a depth of reality that makes them unforgettable.” — Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam Mysteries

“Mickee Voodoo is a very entertaining parody of a “hardboiled” detective story in the mode of Chandler, Hammett, and, more recently, Robert B. Parker…witty banter ensues with the detective cracking wise in a colorful idiom both in dialogue and narrative…delights in wordplay…very clever, and is quite funny…Kapur is a talented and skillful fiction writer.” — John DeChancie, author of The Skyway Trilogy and The Castle Perilous series.

Available from Amazon or on order from your independent bookstore.

Cover Design: Zoe Collins

“Brutal yet gorgeous.” — Poet Elaine Terranova, author of Rinse

“There is searing truth in these enthralling poems.” — Eleanor Wilner, 2025 Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

“This is brave and necessary work that makes for riveting reading.” — Cynthia Hogue, author of Instead, It is dark

How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? tries to answer this question about life. Kaier’s book is a candid memoir-in-poems about family dynamics, love, sex and a distinctive body—all in ravishing and accessible verse. She writes about a complicated mother-daughter relationship that will strike home with many women. Several poems explore what it’s like to live in an unusual body—in her case with skin that is drier and redder than typical for an Irish American woman. The poems are full of yearning for a more satisfying intimate life; many people will understand this. Kaier’s verse also shows a deeply sensuous sensibility—an appreciation for the textures and scents of the natural world and for the pleasures of music and painting. At times lyrical, at times sarcastic, at times searing, these poems speak with a conversational voice that a wide range of readers will enjoy and remember.

www.AnneKaier.com

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the witnesses for peace include soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes.

Ember Days begins with ritual and ends with prayer as the poems tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s worthless cash, Saturday’s prodigal feet.

“Gilliland is a poet of witness and spirituality, grappling with climate devastation while also interrogating world policies and politics.”
— Best American Poetry

“Gilliland waltzes smoothly between the cheeky and conversational and the lyrical.”
— LitHub

“I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty.”
— Cynthia Hogue

Mary Gilliland is the guest poetry editor in the winter 2022 issue of Persimmon Tree.

Order from: https://www.codhill.com/product/ember-days/

Find out more at https://marygilliland.com/

Countermelodies, winner of both the NYC Big Book Award and the Indie Reader Discovery Award for memoir, is a coming of age story about the powerful relationship between a protegee and her mentor, and the devastating effects when that mentor betrays her by withdrawing his support just when she needs it most.

A young woman who yearns for her father’s approval is constantly overshadowed by a brilliant older sister. Her self-doubt vanishes when, at age thirteen, she discovers a passion for the flute and studies with a charismatic teacher who becomes her surrogate father. Years later, she wins an audition to work beside him in the Atlanta Symphony, where she is the youngest and one of few women in the orchestra. After her exhilarating first year, the mentor turns against her and threatens to destroy her professional and personal life. Her love for the flute and drive to be a musician sustain her through additional encounters with abusive men as she tries to succeed in the competitive field of classical music.

“A disturbing and compelling tale of resilience, determination, and musical passion.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Whitman explores power dynamics, patriarchal oppression, and music as personal salvation. … a story of persistence and survival in a world at the mercy of toxic misogyny.” — BlueInk Review

https://ernestinewhitman.ag-sites.net/index.htm

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
Fairytales, Prince Charming, happily-ever-after filled Margie’s girlhood dreams. Her love story blossomed in college when she met a kind, inspirational—and married—professor who changed her life. But, frightened by their growing attraction, he set boundaries, telling her to find someone her own age. A few years later, she did meet a younger man and fell in love. When their marriage ended, she gave up her fairytale fantasies, accepting that she would be alone for the rest of her life. Then, a letter arrived…


From the Amazon reviews

“A beautifully written and honest account of an extraordinary relationship.”

“There’s nothing I like better than a book that keeps me up past my bedtime. I had a hard time putting down this tender, honest, romantic story. It will restore your faith in true love.”

“…It does a great job of capturing the strength and wonder of romantic love and defining it in terms of a lifetime experience. Highly recommended!”

Available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon.

Dr. Alanna Davidson’s life is upended when her father is shot and paralyzed the same night a cutting-edge medical robot is stolen from his laboratory at DARPA. Three years later, the crime remains unsolved.

Alanna, now a senior resident at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, is puzzled when high-profile patients start dying unexpectedly after routine surgeries and resolves to investigate the deaths.

At the same time, the LAPD is tracking a serial killer with a surgical signature who is leaving bodies in the most dangerous neighborhoods of the city.

When a Memorial resident becomes the newest victim, Alanna’s investigation leads to her father’s stolen robot and to a predatory healthcare company intent on taking over Memorial Hospital. But Alanna’s sleuthing draws the killer’s attention. Not only her career, but her life is now in danger.

“Smart, relentless, and terrifyingly plausible, Remote Control fuses cutting-edge medical technology with chilling suspense. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough watching Dr. Alanna risk everything to uncover a truth more sinister than you could ever imagine!”
— Laurie Stevens, author of the Gabriel McRay Thriller Series.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books2Read, or ask for it at your local independent bookstore.

“An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.” — Kirkus Reviews

It is the Civil War, Susannah Shelburne, age 36, is living in South Carolina. Although she and her husband oppose the Southern cause, their only child Francis is a Confederate soldier. When Francis is wounded in Tennessee, Susannah leaves home to find him. Under her care his condition improves, but he soon becomes a prisoner of war, and Susannah strikes a wrenching personal bargain in exchange for his parole. Soon, though, news from South Carolina makes it clear that returning home is impossible, and Francis’s worsening mental state necessitates a high-stakes escape plan.

There is a wildness hidden beneath Susannah’s demure façade, leading her into unconventional, courageous decisions that put her at odds with her husband, her son and her community. Adversity also brings her more fully into the realities of the people of color in her life.

Measure of Devotion’s themes—political differences among families and communities, the urgent need for transracial understanding, a woman’s existential search for control of her own life—are the persistent issues of our national consciousness.

“Measure of Devotion is a debut novel that is bound to enter the canon of classic Civil War literature. That it’s told from a woman’s viewpoint makes it unique.” — Hungry for Good Books

Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller.

For more, go to measureofdevotion.com

 
 
Writer, Barb Drummond, grew up in a home filled with crazy antics, love, laughter, and an exceptionally unique and zany mother. Who else had a mom who baked cream pies just so she’d have one on hand to throw at people she loved?

Barb’s mother Sybil, however, drew the short straw by getting Alzheimer’s in her 60s. The disease stole her vibrant personality and voice. When Sybil died, an ordinary obituary just wouldn’t do. She was a glamorous Renaissance woman filled with creativity; a former ER nurse who saved lives; she was what movies are made of. Her sense of humour and charm made friends far and wide.

Barb wrote the quirky obituary with her mom’s voice. No one could’ve predicted the obit would go viral within 24 hours—worldwide! Hundreds of thousands of people internationally read about Sybil Marie Hicks and her smoking hot body—and they wanted more! Barb’s memoir takes you into her mother’s life and the media whirlwind when her mom became an instant worldwide celebrity after she died.

Within hours of its release, I Finally Have the Smoking Hot Body hit #1 best-seller status on Amazon. It continues to reach readers around the world and has been featured on CBC Radio and other media.

Barb’s book is more than just a story, it’s a book that keeps on giving. A percentage of sales is donated to the Alzheimer’s Society, helping to support families impacted by this devastating disease.

In this hilarious, quirky, and poignant memoir, you’ll fall in love with Sybil and wish you’d known her in real life. (Even if she’d smoosh a cream pie in your face!)

Meet Barb and her mom on Barb’s website.

Available from Amazon.

Season Lightly With Salt, Poems and Recipes from the Test Kitchens of the San Francisco Wild Writing Women is a joyful and sometimes bittersweet  collection of poems and recipes that pays tribute to family, friends and community. Written by the San Francisco Wild Writing Women, poets Angie Minkin, Elise Kazanjian, Heather Saunders Estes, Kathryn Santana Goldman, and anthology editor Robin Michel, this delectable book serves up poems centered around food and family and includes recipes from each poet’s own kitchen.

Preparing and sharing meals with one another nurtures and sustains, comforts and consoles, and heightens our pleasures. We are a nation of immigrants who have brought to America dishes from all over the world. It is more important than ever that we sit at one another’s table and break bread together.

Every palate will find something to satisfy their tastes in these poems and recipes from the various cultures blending in America’s stewpot. You will even learn how to read fortunes in a cup of Armenian Coffee.

Available from Raven & Wren Press and select bookstores.

This book is for you, if you have struggled with depression. There are people who love you, and reasons to live.

If you have tried to help a loved one who does battle with darkness, this book will show that you are not alone.

Rae Dumont is a mother, a widow, and a friend. As a pediatrician and a family therapist, she has shared in many people’s experiences, and tried to help.

She hopes to bring their lives to the page and to share what they have taught her.

Read Rae Dumont’s short stories and essays in Persimmon Tree.

Author’s website: https://www.raedumontwriting.org

Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

Imagine calling yourself a writer. Now it’s time to make it real. Let Scribbly help you become the writer you’ve always wanted to be…without the pressure.

My name is Kim Duke and I’m a full-time writer, Amazon best-selling author and my work has been featured on NBC News, the Globe and Mail and other international media.

My mission is simple. To get more women writing with intention, fun and freedom!

My gentle writing program is mailed to your home every 30 days. Each Scribbly is loaded with quirky writing tips, prompts and examples. My team and I devote over 100 hours into each issue. Gorgeous illustrations, research, art, science and writing that reach out from the pages to inspire you. I can’t wait for you to see your Scribbly!

Scribbly is a gentle writing program that encourages your creativity and gets you writing in five minutes. If you want to explore creative nonfiction writing (without pressure) – you’ll love Scribbly! The best part? When you’re a Scribbly member, you get a chance to submit your writing for publication in Scribbly.

Hooray for Snail Mail!

More about the Scribbly Program can be found at www.kimdukewrites.com/Scribbly

 
“An emotionally affecting story with excellent prose.” — Kirkus Reviews
 
 
It’s 1998 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where the close-knit Italian-American community clings to its traditions. The week of Halloween a shocking discovery shatters the festivities, when the body of an unpopular neighbor is found on her balcony, disguised as a holiday witch.

Helper, a beloved local handyman, becomes a suspect in the ensuing investigation. When his own nephew becomes one of the detectives on the case, long-held secrets and buried traumas are revealed.

The complexities of justice and family loyalty are explored from three perspectives in this captivating story, while this special neighborhood is depicted with warmth and wit.

“The beating heart of Carroll Gardens Story is its wonderful depiction of the Brooklyn neighbourhood, which Frances brings to vivid life through her authentic, quirky and complex characters… a powerful journey about the importance of acknowledging and speaking the truth before real healing can begin. May this be only the first of many more Sally Frances books to come!”
— Ann Lambert, author of the Russell and Leduc Murder Mystery Series

“Sally Frances writes with clarity and emotion, and each character has a distinctive voice. Readers who enjoy The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold will find Carroll Gardens Story similar in its exploration of trauma, healing, and the ripple effects of a mysterious death on a community, told through deeply personal perspectives.”
— Carol Thompson for Readers’ Favorite

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home is the living, breathing, messy story of one woman trying her hardest to free her wounded heart and uncover her true self.  It is a memoir, told with grace and humor, of the years at the turn of the 21st century when the author moved to a ranch in a remote valley in the Colorado mountains and a path opened to a radically new way of living.

Winner of the 2025 Colorado Authors League Memoir Award, this is a story that will resonate with anyone who is seeking a way to connect with their own authentic voice.

“A riveting intimate tale of a woman’s journey in search of a home, in her body, her spirit and in the land.” — Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Sacred Feminine

“A heart-wrenching and healing story…” — Jesse Rene Gibbs, Girl Hidden

“A quiet triumph of a memoir” — Readers Favorites Silver Medal Winner

Learn more about A Tree with My Name on It and the author www.victresshitchock.com



Available from Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore.

Audiobook available on Audible.

 
“Gwen Suesse’s latest book, Notes from Planet Widow, serves as a powerful antidote to the pain and insecurity women who’ve suffered a loss profoundly understand.” —Shawn LaTorre, for Story Circle Network

Planet Widow is a story of rebirth, describing the trail of insights that knit themselves together to restore my sense of wholeness within an altered context. While I couldn’t totally eradicate grief, I could learn profound lessons from it. Finding the courage to be open to it as a fierce teacher, I slowly lived my way into a new realization of self that includes grief, transforming disorientation into grounding and a measure of peace.

“A loving, gracious invitation to a land that is ever so difficult to traverse.” —Geneen Roth, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Women, Food, and God

“… satisfying grief memoir… In taut, uncluttered prose, the author organizes her thoughts in accordance with the core lessons she learned during her healing process.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Ideal for people who are navigating profound loss, Notes from Planet Widow offers welcome comfort, polished writing, clear-eyed guidance, and—by its very existence—heartening proof that we do survive grief … and even can thrive in the wake.” —Book Life Reviews

Learn more about the author at https://www.gwensuesseauthor.com/

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, or ask for it at your local independent bookstore.

Readers will admire young Joey’s mother, Ellie, as she navigates around poverty and her abusive, philandering, alcoholic husband to help her son achieve his impossible dream of becoming a classical musician. She wasn’t sure what a symphony was and had never set foot in a concert hall, yet without her husband’s knowledge, she managed to scrape together enough courage and money for standing-room only tickets to a San Francisco Symphony performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Joey was in awe of the violinist and the orchestra and sat transfixed throughout this concert that set him at nine years old on his long journey to a musical career.

Ellie is deeply proud of her son and does what she can to protect him from his father’s verbal abuse and attempts to dissuade him from a career as “some sissy horn player.” Joey uses his creativity to passively get even with his dad for his cruelty, but his self confidence suffers. He does have Ellie’s backing always, knows she will be there to rescue him if needed. She models for her son loyalty, persistence and hard work and allows no excuses when times are hard.

Readers will follow Joey through high school where his musical talent grows. He falls deeply in love with a curly-haired beauty and is torn between his love for her and pursuing his musical dream. He chooses to marry another girl who courts him and offers to work to help him through college. This decision to marry puts Joey into a seemingly endless triangle love affair, even as his professional life explodes. He auditions for the Sacramento Symphony and is offered a position. He plays his horn in Hollywood with studio musicians, performs with The Beach Boys, Dorothy Dandridge and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Will Joey ever be able to right his love life? What will Ellie advise him to do?

Nanci’s short stories and poems have been published in the California Writers Club Literary Review, A CWC Anthology, October Hill Magazine, The Fault Zone, Sacramento Poetry Society’s Tule Review, Your Daily Poem, The Monterey Poetry Review, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and many other online and print publications. For reader reviews and samples of her writing and art, visit nancileewoody.com.

To listen to the music in Tears and Trombones, from Shostakovich to Johnny Cash, visit bookcompanion.com.

Watch on Amazon for Nanci’s new book of poetry coming out this fall.

Tears and Trombones is available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller.

Dear Phebe is an out-of-the ordinary autobiography, an encounter with the myth (and truth) of Judy Wells’ own origins and destiny. Sorting through family letters, the Berkeley poet hears voices from her ancestors—three Dickinson sisters who went out west in the 1860s to seek their fortunes as pioneer schoolteachers. I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author finds herself in the after-life with the Dickinson sisters, and then ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe’s 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library.
— Bridget Connelly, Forgetting Ireland

With Dear Phebe, poet Judy Wells has produced a cutting-edge work of art that combines family ancestry research with poetic interrogations. Each Dickinson sister she profiles has a unique trajectory to California; all are waylaid by what Jane Austen called “the marriage plot.” Wells sings to them, dances with them (and away from them), challenges them, excavates them from a box of letters into the light of the 2lst-century and a world they could not have imagined. This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines.
— Lauren Coodley, author of California: A Multicultural Documentary History and The Same River Twice

“Go West, young man,” is the famous command, but young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells’ great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, Delia and Abbie, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose in narratives that are so compelling I didn’t want the book to end.
— Lucille Lang Day, Married at Fourteen: A True Story and Becoming an Ancestor

For more about Dear Phebe and the author, go to her website: http://www.judywellspoet.com

Dear Phebe can be ordered directly from the author for $27.95 (22.95 + 5.00 s/h).
To pay by check, make the check out to Judy Wells and contact her at jwellspoet@att.net for her address.

To pay by PayPal/credit card, send $27.95 to jwalfredsen@yahoo.com.
In “What’s this for?” include Dear Phebe, your name and address.

This little giftbook has become a timeless classic. Like a visual meditation, with few words and soft watercolors, these pages offer caring and comfort to all who travel the journey of grief.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite independent bookseller.

Mother-Daughter Banquet untangles the knot of memory and finds a thread of love and reconciliation.

After losing her mother at the age of nine, Alice Bloch becomes a surrogate mother to her four younger siblings, while a formidable triumvirate of grandmother, stepmother, and aunt step into the maternal role to fill the void for Bloch herself, guiding her development as woman and writer. Diving deep into her memories of growing up as a Jewish lesbian in mid-twentieth century Ohio, Bloch brings us universal truths about the mother-daughter bond.

“Compelling, provocative, and above all else, completely honest, the four unique mothers who inhabit these pages will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.”

“I found myself laughing out loud on one page and teary-eyed on the next…. These stories are poignant, funny, and captivating.”  – Lillian Faderman, author of Naked in the Promised Land and My Mother’s Wars

Available from Minerva Rising Press, from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or from your independent bookstore.

 
“I finished Alison Hawthorne Deming’s latest poetry collection, Blue Flax and Yellow Mustard Flower, and sat quietly absorbing it, stunned by its power. Deming is a writer whose work in both prose and poetry is deeply, lyrically engaged with the… world and what humans have done to the earth and all who live here. To assess the damage, to see for herself, she travels to earth’s farthest, wildest reaches. Her compassion for the brave and broken world she has found dovetails with her own fortitude and courage.”
—Cynthia Hogue, poetry editor of Persimmon Tree and author, most recently, of Instead, It is Dark

“This collection is an homage to naturalists and explorers, to environmental consciousness, to curiosity and to service––it is a lyric acknowledgment of the delicate balance of life.”
—Ellen Bass, author of In Indigo

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
In 1974, a German student, Ina Andreae, comes to Los Angeles to study — and, later, commits suicide. Fifty years later, her brother Wolfgang Andreae visits Deena Metzger, who was Ina’s teacher, to ask Deena what she knew of Ina. What follows from that alliance is this novella, a fiction that is not a fiction, an unfolding emergence of facts, events, and stories, showing us how wounds going back to Hitler still affect us, and their startling resemblance to the grim political dramas of today.

“…A heart-breaking, heart-enhancing ghost story of whirlwind proportions, an incantatory, ethical thriller masterfully rendered by one of our great contemporary visionaries.” – Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum

Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

Learn more about Deena Metzger at deenametzger.net

 
 
For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways.

“This remembrance is a poignant love letter to the father Mlynarczyk has spent a lifetime grieving.” — Kirkus

“Haunted by her father’s psychic crisis and his early and unexpected death, Mlynarczyk brings us on a poignant journey, exploring her father’s violent breakdown and coming to terms with a past weighted with fear and silence.” — Julia Miele Rodas, author of Autistic Disturbances

“This memoir exemplifies the healing power of writing as a path through pain.” — Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir

“From Seed to Tree to Fruit does what good memoirs must do: explain the present by helping us to understand the past.” — Wendy Ryden, co-author of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes and Noble.

The Secrets of the Old Post Cemetery reunites readers with Gabriela Domenici, the smalltown librarian whose accidental sleuthing puts her on the frontlines of death and danger. At the heart of the mystery is The Traitor’s Map, which is either a hoax or, just possibly, an artifact from the American Revolution. When Gabriela assigns the map as a research project to a group of college students, one of them is found murdered on the lakeshore—triggering a spiral of death and deceit that soon embroils Gabriela and the man she loves.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or your favorite independent bookstore.

Encounter with the Future is a political and social drama running parallel with a rapid coming of age. It is a true story of an 18-year-old girl who arrived in London from behind the iron curtain alone. She became an emigrant when her country was invaded by Soviet Union in August of 1968. She went from sleeping in the telephone booth at London’s Victoria railway station, to waitressing, then becoming a model, actress, even a James Bond girl.

This engrossing memoir is told in series of essays, some previously published, some wholly new.

Encounter with the Future is a mirror of an unforgettable journey filled with fear, pain, veracity, and laughter.

“Pavel is a natural storyteller and shrewd observer with a deep understanding of people. She keeps readers engaged across decades, continents, and pages.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Pavel manages, from her present and sophisticated vantage, to evoke the innocence of youth.”
— Nicolas Delbanco, author of Why Writing Matters

“A touching tale of a woman who makes it through the tornadoes of life and still comes out centered.”
— Goodreads

“Beautifully written and captivating…it will make you look differently at your own life.”
— Cindy Myers, author of Mile High Mystery

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.