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.



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.

 
 
“In Winter of My Life, Sherri Wright engages in conversation with memory in a debut book which evokes the extraordinary imagery of The Eastern Shore. In such poems as ‘The Garden Goddess’ and ‘The Great Blue Heron at Silver Lake’, Wright’s imaginative approach allows the reader to delve into the inner workings of the mind of the feminine, exploring contemporary issues such as domesticity, divorce, and the vast differences between generations. Questioning her own mortality, Wright allows the reader to entertain the question of regret, and the enormous joy of living life unrestrained.”
— Tara A. Elliott, poet and Executive Director of Eastern Shore Writers Association
 
 
Available from Amazon and Bookshop, from the publisher Kelsay Books, from the author’s favorite local booksellers, Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach DE and Books & Books in Key West FL, and from your own favorite bookstore.

 
 
Deep Ends explores the fragile balance between treading life’s turbulent waters and mastering a survival float. A father invents his brand of cross-chest carry to save himself and his grandson from drowning in a “current of light and sound.” A mother tosses her young daughter into the deep end of a public pool in hopes she will learn to swim. A daughter becomes a lifeguard, a teacher inspired by Dolly Parton’s “can-do” attitude, and an empowerment drummer. Family, grief, survival, and climate change are the themes in Roberta Schultz’s second full-length collection.
 
 
Available from the publisher.

What if you could have a different marriage without having to get a different spouse? At age sixty, marital therapist, Leah Fisher, does just that. She wants to explore the world; he wants to focus on his career. After much discussion, the couple agrees to be apart for a year, each pursuing their own dream while arranging for periodic reunions and nurturing a committed relationship.

Leah’s solo journey leads her to a shaman in the Amazon, a Colombian drug runner, a massive earthquake, volunteer projects, loving families, and lots of swimming in warm oceans. The couple’s relationship changes…for the better. Unknowingly, they’ve been reconfiguring their idea of a good marriage, shaping one that better suits their needs in the second half of life.

This wise and often humorous book combines an intimate view of a long-term marriage, guidance in couple negotiation, healing adventures, and an inspiring example of individual expression and relational growth in later life.

“A bold audacious experiment… described with breathtaking honesty.”
— Judith Viorst

“An inspiring travel remembrance… a practical guidebook to marital satisfaction. “
— Kirkus

“As she and Charley continually alter their relationship, they model lived feminism and compromise. The result is wanderlust-inducing—the stuff of dreams and daring.”
— NEW PAGES.COM

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

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.

Persimmon Tree readers will recognize and love young Joey’s mother, Ellie, as she navigates through poverty and around a philandering, alcoholic husband to help her boy achieve his dream of becoming a classical musician. She scrimps and saves to take her nine-year-old boy to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, though she had never before set foot in a concert hall.

Readers will follow Joey through his childhood with all its real-life pain and watch him use his creativity to “get even” for his dad’s cruelty. Though his relationship with his mother is not without trials, she models for him loyalty, persistence, and hard work, and allows no excuses when times are hard.

In high school, Joey is torn between his love for a curly-haired beauty and pursuing his musical dream. When another girl courts him and offers to help him pay his way through college and music lessons, Joey marries her, thus forming a tormented love triangle.

You will follow Joey as he becomes a successful musician. But, having achieved his musical goals, will Joey ever be able to set right his personal life?

Available on Amazon

Check out Nanci’s website for samples of her writing and art. Nancileewoody.com

And click here to hear the music in Tears and Trombones.

features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.



Available at Guernica Editions, Amazon, ThriftBooks, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop and independent bookstores.

 
 
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.

As the 20th century careened towards the finish line, author Victress Hitchcock moved with her husband from their familiar urban world to a remote 160-acre ranch in the mountains of Colorado. Within months, their lives unraveled, and out of the wreckage a new path opened to a radically new way to be in the world. She was broken hearted but ready to meet whatever was to come with insight, horse sense, and humor.

A Tree with My Name on It is not a handbook on healing trauma. It is a living, breathing, messy story, filled with joy and sorrow, of one woman trying her hardest to free her wounded heart and uncover her true self.

It is a story that will resonate with anyone who has reached a moment in their lives when they are ready to tear off the bandage and take a deep look at the fears that have held them hostage for too long.

“It is rare to find a memoir that entwines elements of Buddhist wisdom with psychological insights…with the grace and metaphorical prowess of an author who wields poetic description and psychological reflection with equal strength. A Tree with My Name on It deserves a prominent place in libraries, recommendable as a book club or women’s reading group choice.”
— D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Visit Victress’ Website for more information.

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

In 1967, when teenaged Julia MacDonnell relinquished her son to closed adoption, she understood she’d never see him again and would always keep this secret.  Fast forward half a century when an email from him shows up in her queue.  Hidden Girls tells how her jubilation about this reconnection upended her life.  Julia is forced to grapple with her memories of love for her lost child, and of coercive manipulations by her family and Catholic Charities. MacDonnell was compelled to tell her story after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade because of her fear that women would again lose control of their reproductive rights.

“A visceral, moving account of adoption and the systems that prioritize profit and propriety over people.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“… an important beautifully-told accounting of a terrible history, and a timely warning that we not repeat its mistakes.”
– Kathryn Joyce, author of The Child Catchers

“… a beautiful, powerful, and truth-telling story…I was struck by how it is both every birth mother’s story and a story that is completely unique to the author.”
– Marylee MacDonald, birth mother, and author of Surrender

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and BookBaby.

 
 
Crooked Hearts Press publishes forgotten, overlooked, and thus disappeared women writers over the age of 55, alongside veteran writers we recognize for their excellence.

In Barbara Allen’s Joy Falls, the most recent Crooked Hearts Press publication, a traumatized family has an elusive desire for normalcy that is found in lyrical moments and humorous problem-solving. The novel is filled with characters who have the stamina for the chaotic present even as their personal histories invade. Joy Falls helps us, not in a self-help way, but in the way fiction helps through storytelling, interesting characters, and laughter. It is about the profoundness of children, the importance of humor, and what happens when we show up for our own lives.

“Barbara Allen’s gorgeous debut novel, Joy Falls, is a true knockout. Allen has created a vibrating—more than vibrant!—world in this comic-tragedy of family madness and love. That she can be so laugh-out-loud funny and heart-breaking and wise all at once never ceases to amaze me. As soon as I finished the book, I had to read it again. I so look forward to more work from her in the future!” — Elizabeth Evans, As Good As Dead

Go to the Crooked Hearts Press website to purchase Joy Falls and other Crooked Hearts books.

 
Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa is an edgy, humorous memoir with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids and no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say, “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can, too.” Pieces such as ‘What Not to Say at a Funeral’ and ‘Dusting and Other Insanities’ provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her.

Marian Mathews Clark grew up among loggers in Mist, Oregon (pop 50), then caught the Union Pacific to Iowa to attend Graceland College. In the ensuing years, she capped perfume bottles on Coty’s assembly line in New York, was stranded on Loveland Pass during a blizzard, ironed costumes for Polynesian dancers at the Calgary Stampede, tried to shear a sheep in Australia, earned an MFA in Fiction from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and with co-writer Patricia Stevens was a finalist at O’jai’s Film Festival for their feature script Timber.

Bart Yates, author of The Distance Between Us, said of her memoir, “Clark is a sly writer; she lured me in with…broken garbage disposals and mysteriously disappearing walls; only later did I realize she was…writing about mortality, loss, joy, and love. Great stuff.”

2015 edition available from Amazon, Culicidae Press, and from your local independent bookseller.

 
 
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.

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 Cooley, 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

To Order: Contact Judy Wells directly at jwellspoet@att.net
Website: www.judywellspoet.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

Women, the largest and yet most unrecognized population of the dance arts community, are spotlighted in renowned dance photographer Julie Lemberger’s Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, a coloring book, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.

Lemberger, who has been photographing dance for almost two decades, transformed her photographs into illustrations almost ready to color and then added psychedelic, floral and abstract backgrounds for the figures “to dance in.”

The 92 page volume features today’s leading dance innovators and interpreters, and celebrates their diverse genres and perspectives.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance is a perfect gift for children-of-all-ages including grandparents and grandchildren, especially those who love women, dance and art.

Two options available:
Coloring book for $20

Shipping & handling is $5 each for U.S. addresses. Please contact for International shipping costs.

The cryptic prompts—fragments, really—of Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies unveiled themselves to Leslie Ullman as rough translations from an obscure language. As an experiment, Ullman used each one as a poem title, and in doing so she accessed a thrill of freedom, uncertainty, and propulsion beyond her own familiar patterns and landscapes. In the process, she found herself exploring the literary, visual, and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to her before.

Unruly Tree showcases the most successful of Ullman’s play, and the result is an agile work takes itself by surprise again and again. At its heart this book is about the creative process itself—even when it applies to experiences outside the arts—and about reclaiming an inner freedom many of us lose in our lives as adults in these noisy, rancorous times.

Available from University of New Mexico Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and and your local independent bookstore.

 
 
Follow this grandmother’s journey with mini-stories in poetry, illuminating her transformation from her fundamentalist beginnings towards a liberated mindset; from whiteness to an intercultural, artistic self. Poetic vignettes delve into identity, culture, radical acceptance, and learning to thrive in a marriage to an autistic man born to Korean American parents of Hawaii.

The poems in Songs Sharp and Tender also speak to the losses we experience as parents as our children age. Dilemmas caused by California’s fires and political divides appear also.  Nature’s power of healing and illumination show up—all accompanied by the authenticity, vulnerability, anger, grief and empathy essential to our spiral up the tree of life.

As a reader whom I only met once proclaimed: “Everyone should read this book.”

Available from the publisher, Kelsay Books, or from Amazon.

Older Wiser Shorter is an intimate collection of 89 poems from Jane Seskin, a working psychotherapist and author. Seskin, authentic, funny, insightful, quirky and heartfelt, acknowledges the disappointments, physical vulnerability and emotional loss taking place in her senior years. She is able to discover within herself a solid sense of power, resilience and new-found joys through her struggles to acknowledge, accommodate and accept her aging. Seskin’s ability to make the very personal universal, will resonate with readers seeking to discover new ways to honor the past, celebrate the present and welcome the future. A Reading Guide to the poems will inspire further reflection and discussion for book and women’s groups.

Praise for Older Wiser Shorter:

“Even tho I’m not a fan of poetry, I found Jane Seskin’s poems to be a delight. They hit home.”
— Jane Brody, former Personal Health columnist, New York Times

“I sat down to read one poem last night and I ended up reading half the book. I feel as though I know you. You have definitely captured the experience of aging.”
— Mary Pipher, author of Women Running North and My Life in Light

“Candid, funny, and best of all inspiring, the poems in Jane Seskin’s Older Wiser Shorter throw open a window on aging. Suddenly a breeze of resilience sails through. I learned from Seskin’s poems; they became like mentors for the strange adventure of late-life living. Kindness infuses them. The ‘enormous optimism’ of this intrepid book might prove the greatest wisdom of the ages.”
— Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

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/

Through her search for newfound purpose in her seventies, author Karen Roberts discovered that voices of encouragement were difficult to find among the popular paradigms of aging: decline, withdrawal, and disengagement, among them.

This workbook presents a remarkable opportunity to unlock a fulfilling and purposeful later life stage.

What’s Included:

• Thought-provoking discussions on aging, gender, and culture
• Interviews with eight inspiring women who overcame challenges and pursued their passions later in life
• Engaging questions to help you reflect and grow on your journey.
• Unique experiences and wisdom that women bring to the later years

Filled with inspirational and educational opportunities, The Blossoming of Women promotes a different vision of elder years and retirement that translates not to retiring from life but entering another phase of efficiency and meaningful thoughts, actions, and choices. Beautiful nature images throughout support the gentle feel and uplifting spirit of these stories. — D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Karen Marie Roberts received an MS degree in human development after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990. Her interests moved from alternative healing to gerontology and stages of aging. In graduate school, this became a concentration in creative longevity and phenomenology. She attended Wellesley College, UC Berkeley, and Fielding Graduate School.

 
 
My name is Leanne Phillips. I am a later-in-life emerging and award-winning writer, a certified book coach, and a professional editor. No matter where you are in your writing journey, I can help you take your writing to the next level.

My superpower and my greatest joy is helping busy women and seniors reach their publishing goals. I can help you plan, outline, write, and revise the book you’ve always dreamed of writing. I also offer manuscript evaluations and pitch services (query letter, synopsis, agent research, and pitch plan), as well as editing services (developmental, line, and copyediting).

I earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California at Riverside, book coaching certification in fiction and in memoir through Author Accelerator, and a copyediting certificate from the University of California at San Diego.

I take a limited number of one-on-one coaching clients each quarter. Please visit my website at leannephillips.com for more information or to book a complimentary 20-minute introductory coaching call.

I can’t wait to talk with you about your book!

LEANNE PHILLIPS
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
Website | Instagram | Substack

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

 
 
The Writer and the Engineer is both a love story and an examination of what it takes to be a writer. A fictional biography, it is inspired by the life of mystery writer Mignon Eberhart. Today, few readers, even avid mystery readers, know of her, but in the 1930s, she was known as the “American Agatha Christie,” her books were best sellers, and deserve to be read anew.

Mignon was barely 20 when she fell in love and married an engineer, but, while her career soared, the earnings from her popular mystery romance novels providing a lavish lifestyle, her marriage floundered.  His indifference to sex set the stage for the emotional conflict that pervaded their life together. Why did she stay married to him? How did she write as the restless engineer constantly changed jobs, as they traipsed around the world? How did she turn out those intricately plotted, best-selling novels through marriage, divorce, and remarriage?

Eberhart wrote with discipline and dedication, no matter where she lived or traveled, even as she found herself in Paris, in the ambit of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. The novel explores and examines the peculiar ethos of the publishing industry that she worked in, along with the unique role of editors in the Golden Age of Mysteries.

This is a story for writers and for readers both, a window into the aspirations and inspirations of a writer, an exploration of the intertwining of her life and work, and of the milieu in which she did that work.

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.

 
On 9/11, Andrea Carter Brown was a resident of downtown Manhattan living just a block from the World Trade Center. September 12 chronicles her up close and all too personal experience of the attack, but, even more, the continuing horror and eventual healing of the months and years afterward.

September 12 won the 2022 IPPY Silver Medal in Poetry, the James Dickey Prize from Five Points, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, the Puddinghouse Press Chapbook Competition, The MacGuffin National Poet Hunt, and is cited in the Library of Congress Online Research Guide to the Poetry of 9/11.

“A more haunting memorial to 9/11 than this book will be hard to find. Reading September 12 is a wrenching but restorative experience you won’t soon forget”. 
— Martha Collins, poet, author of Casualty Reports and Blue Front

“… detail by detail, we watch the process of innocence captured by absolutely unpredicted trauma, and how the experience lives on and on, through shock and terror, through the kindness of strangers, through the heart of a beloved, through grief and elegy, through normality that will never again be normal.” 
— Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate

“This brave book documents great loss, but also hard-won psychic resilience in poems of astonishing beauty and wisdom. September 12 is necessary poetry.”
— Cynthia Hogue, Poetry Editor, Persimmon Tree

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.

Enter a world that is both familiar and foreign, even to most Australians, a world readers will learn to treasure as they make their joyful way through this fascinating collection of stories that string together into a memoir of life in a land far away.

“Finding the Joy is a a poignant, heart-wrenching, heart-filling celebration of, and testimony to, an Australia that has changed so much in a lifetime. Yet the raw emotions, loves, tragedies, every day-ness and splendid wonder of the people remain a constant.”
— Ian Andrew, author of Face Value

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

Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth’s living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.

“Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth.”
—BOOKLIST

“In an age as acrimonious as ours, Linda Hogan’s new poetry collection, A History of Kindness, sounds especially poignant.”
—THE WASHINGTON POST

“There is no one like Linda Hogan. I read her poetry to both calm and ignite my heart. A History of Kindness is a series of oracles rising from the page born out of a life of listening, feeling, responding.”
—TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, author of Erosion

Available from Torrey House Press and Bookshop.org

Spirit Captive is the impressive collection of poems, short stories, memories and artworks that Helen Bar-Lev presents to us as a declaration of her love for Jerusalem, a city harboring as much pain as pleasure. Through Helen’s eyes, we see contested Jerusalem through the seasons and the hours, a city of exquisite beauty. To appreciate the real spirit of this work we should start from the end: reading the poem Spirit Captive, we can feel the bond that exists between the poet and her chosen city. We can also sense the universality of Jerusalem – the painful, sometimes suffering, beauty that permeates it.

In A Love Poem to Jerusalem, Helen wonders if God created the sweet air of the city just to intoxicate her and if every stone or gate or flower may have been created as a source of inspiration for her paintings. This book is Helen’s masterpiece, where her poems, prose and paintings pay magnificent tribute to Jerusalem.

Available from BookBaby and Bookshop.org, shipping now.

Bonnie was nine when she realized her dad secretly wanted to be her mom. And that her mom, numb in her pain, was unreachable.

She experienced endless trials and losses in childhood: her dad transitioning into a woman; her parents’ divorce; a vacant mother who brought a monster into the house; the loss of her baby sister; bullying at school; heartache; and daily isolation.

She became the parent of her parents.

Stark. Unsentimental. Gritty. It is the story of a young girl forced to survive by using her wits. For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, Wild, and Maid—this powerful memoir of resilience is impossible to set down.

Readers find the memoir “a moving and unforgettable story of resilience”. They describe it as “a powerful memoir of struggle and hardship, with moments of strength and perseverance”.

5 star Amazon review: “Inspirational. Walk with Bonnie through her life’s journey thus far. Feel her emotions as she navigates adversity. Watch her move forward despite life’s tragedies. A good read…highly recommend.”

Available on Amazon.

Get ready to be swept into a world where the thrill of the unknown reigns supreme. Journey with a female trailblazer on eight spirited real-life adventures to remote and breathtaking corners of the world. Brenda’s tales shine with a mix of intelligence, wit, and courage as she faces daunting physical and cultural challenges. Raft with her through the rugged homelands of secluded Ethiopian tribes. Accompany her to collect latex sap in leech infested Sri Lankan rubber tree forests. Observe her confront a vengeful Guatemalan wooden idol–a decision she’ll soon regret. Then join her in celebrating the arranged marriage of an anxious Pakistani bride.

The stakes reach their zenith with the brutal murder of a friend by terrorists–a moment that forces Brenda to reckon with the harshest realities of the world she craves to explore. Through every adrenaline packed blend of daring exploits and deep reflections, Brenda gains profound insights, emerging stronger, braver and more enlightened. Her tales will fascinate avid adventurers, armchair travelers, and fans of Eat Pray Love, Wild and Tracks.

Dive in to experience our amazing world in a whole different way, and let Brenda’s journeys inspire you to chase your own wild dreams.

“She explores the wonders of the world, with a gutsy curiosity to find out more about the cultures and customs of lands far beyond our shores. Her descriptions and insights are so vivid, you’ll feel like you’re there!”—Amazon review by Virginia M.

“This beautiful book ignites your heart to be an adventurer who is fearless, pushing your boundaries to live a life of wonder. Highly recommend this book!”—Goodreads review by Esther D.

Available on Amazon, Bookshop, and from your local independent bookseller.

Follow Brenda’s blog posts on www.eyeopenerpress.com