We invite you to scroll through ArtsMart. It won’t take long – and you’ll be happily surprised at the good things you’ll find. A book that you realize is the very one you’ve been wanting to read – you just didn’t know it until you saw it here. The perfect "happy birthday" or "thank you" or “just because this made me think of you” gift. The writing course that will set you on a new career. The artist whose work you admire and would love to own. Go ahead. Take a look. You’ll be glad you did.

Links to Amazon are affiliate links, meaning that although the price remains exactly the same for you, Persimmon Tree receives a small commission on each purchase. While we do not in any way endorse Amazon (indeed, we support independent bookstores!), there is no denying that buying from Amazon does benefit Persimmon Tree at no extra effort or cost to you.

In Georgette Unis’ Watercolors in the Desk Drawer, the world is rendered in intricate detail, lush as the pigments on an artist’s palette. Family, nature, politics, and art circumscribe the arc of a life where “time bends / the chronometer” and “leaves do not grow / in the winter soil of philosophies / but rather along the arteries / of unfortunates.” Whether tracking an ancestral immigrant childhood or the results of the most recent election, Unis is attuned to the shifting world, where memories pulled from the desk drawer of recollection reinvent and reinvigorate the landscape.

 

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or from your independent bookstore.

 
 
“Pet lovers will lap up every word of this charming and candid memoir of a single woman opening her heart and home to an emotionally complicated cat. Like the best pet stories, it is what we learn about the human experience that matters most.”
-John Grogan, author of international best-seller Marley and Me

When copywriter Anne Kaier stops traffic to rescue a stray cat, neither she nor the cat knows what lies in store…

You’ll lose yourself in this short, witty, true-life story of how Anne hopes a beguiling cat called Henry can help her adjust as a single woman in the amped-up city.

But first, how will she lure Henry out from under the bed-when not even her ten-year-old nephew can get him to stir?

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

Lusty, vigorous, zestful. It’s hard to imagine our parents in the throes of passion, yet jinx and heavenly calling does just that. DuMar culls original text and graphics from love letters her mother penned to the poet’s father during 1953-1954. From these letters mailed between first date and marriage, DuMar distills her mother’s intimacies, anxieties, and endearments, engaging readers in the captivating dynamic of a couple falling into a 50-year future.

Available for purchase here: https://lilypoetryreview.blog/lily-poetry-review-press/jinx-and-heavenly-calling-by-kelly-dumar/

“The best kind of historical fiction:  a wonderful read with a marvelous heroine.”

Rachel Klein hopes she can ignore the Nazis when they roll into Amsterdam in May 1940. She’s falling in love, and her city has been the safest place in the world for Jewish people since the Spanish Inquisition. But when Rachel’s Gentile boyfriend is forced to disappear rather than face arrest, she realizes that everything is changing, and she must, too.

An Address in Amsterdam shows that, even in the most hopeless situation, a young woman can choose to act with courage — and even love.

• Winner, Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction
• Kirkus Reviews Indie Book of the Month
• Amazon #1 Bestseller Jewish Historical Fiction

Read Mary Dingee Fillmore’s reflections about Amsterdam’s WWII history, and about visiting Amsterdam.

We encourage everyone to buy the book here to support independent bookstores. For those who prefer it, the Amazon link is here, and there are many other options.

Please read the book, review it, and pass it on to friends or your local library.

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

Available from Sundress Publications and Bookshop.org or from your independent bookstore.

 
 
A keen eye for the sights and sounds of the natural world characterizes Suzanne Cottrell’s Nature Calls Outside My Window, A Collection of Poems and Stories. Throughout the collection, we hear the literal calls of nature from birds to bison, but we also feel the invitation to step into the natural environment and find our place within it.

 
 
Whether an elegy for the bobwhite, an homage to a skink, or a story about finding a snake in the bathtub, Suzanne Cottrell’s prose and poetry will make you feel glad to be alive on this sweet, green Earth.

 
 
Available at Kelsay Books and from Amazon.

You can follow Suzanne Cottrell’s writing journey at www.suzanneswords.com.

Inspired by the true story of the author’s mother’s escape from the Holocaust.

Leaving her Jewish family behind in Nazi–occupied Czechoslovakia, Lena’s journey takes her to an English village — where she faces prejudice and finds herself torn between two men.

An engrossing novel that “brings the forces of history to a very human level” (Booklist)

Winner of the IBPA Silver Medal in Historical Fiction. Now available in audiobook, narrated by the 4-time AudioFile Award Winner Jilly Bond

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

Audiobook available from Audible – or wherever you get your audiobooks.

More information from https://www.barbararidley.com/.

“How many windows can the heart bear?” asks Linda Tomol Pennisi in The Burning Boat, and how many nesting selves does today’s self carry? Invoking the muses of dance, music, and art, Pennisi listens many layers beneath the chatter, exposing those lustrous synapses where we “understand for a moment what the world is made of.”

Perhaps, as Pennisi’s poems suggest, a woman comes of age again and again—through memory, through motherhood, through the expansion of that hidden life. …each poem trimmed to essential, carefully selected gestures…shap[ing] each poem to prism, to prayer…  

Available on Amazon and at Nine Mile Books https://www.ninemile.org/bookseries

Infused with eco-logic, informed by feminism, and taking cues from Eve, Cain, Proserpine, Ulysses, Parsifal and selves present and past, these fifty poems illustrate myths of nature and the nature of inherited myth.

Available from Codhill or from your independent bookstore.

More information from https://marygilliland.com/

“Mary Gilliland’s magisterial new collection, The Devil’s Fools, opens in myth and magic, but its vast reach is deeply rooted in her reverence for earth and all earthly creations.…From first to last, I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty of this wondrous collection.”

Subverting received traditions, the lyrics of The Devil’s Fools speak to and for those wanting heaven: modern pilgrims, medieval masons; seafarer, axe murderer, alcoholic; daughter, spouse, sibling, mother; a woman on pause, a monarch of the underworld, Eve stepping out past Eden.

WINNER OF THE CODHILL PRESS PAULINE UCHMANOWICZ POETRY AWARD

In Roberta Schultz’s fourth chapbook, ASKING PRICE, questions are key to examining humanity’s relationship to the planet we live on. Who eats what? When comes another dragon’s charm for pain? Why don’t we ever see a live armadillo?

Join the bargaining war as a couple haggles with a reluctant seller over the sale of his home. Consider why some of us slash glyphs that forbid while others sail their ragged boats forward to rescue the drowning.

Available from Workhorse Writers.

The town of Timber nestled in the Oregon woods with its population of fifty is as much a character in Marian Mathews Clark’s novel These Doors as are those fifty citizens. Their stories that unfold chronologically from 1959 to 1983 reveal that a few emigrate but fewer want to.

In an era with no cell phones and an unreliable landline service, Timber’s Valley Store is e-mails, twitters, tweets, the hub where folks reminisce about blackout curtains and their neighbor who died at Pearl Harbor, haggle over spotted owls and clear cutting, mourn fellow loggers killed in the woods, voice curiosity about Chet who shows up from eastern Oregon to extract his son from white man’s land, and are suspicious of the hippies on the old Marshall place who log with mules. They disagree about whether or not the preacher who claims he saw God is crazy and if the ex-con who returns from prison with a new wife killed his old one. But they agree that the Portland transplant who pushes her petitions ‘for the good of Timber’ is a royal pain and that the poem over the entry of the Timber Store that says “The best people in the world pass through these doors,” is mostly true.

Published by Culicidae Press.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard’s exuberantly lyrical collection is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate series drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman’s observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world.

“A cosmopolitan of interiority,” as Eleanor Wilner describes her, “Brossard creates meta-cities where the political lies down with the poetic.” Cynthia Hogue’s co-translation, as Wilner adds, “doesn’t feel like translation, but like the discovery of a wholly original poet newly minted in English.”  

Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real.

Published by Omnidawn Press

Available from Omnidown Press or Amazon, or your independent bookstore.

Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1940s – the shy and introverted only child of a glamorous, eccentric divorcée – was a challenge that proved to be lifelong – and ironically the catalyst that propelled the author to go on the professional stage.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

“Mother Tongue is not only dramatic and engrossing, it is also insightful and wise. Read it! Read it! You will never forget it!”

“Joyce Kornblatt’s voice is lyrical and powerful, and this lovely novel is about being lost and being found, in the deepest, most primal sense. A beautiful, beautiful book.”

“This author’s worthy return is full of grace . . .”

Mother Tongue begins with a shocking discovery.  In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold.

In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor.  “When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own.”

In four voices of those whose lives were changed forever by the abduction, the mystery of Nella’s kidnapping emerges. Why was she taken?  How was the secret kept for so long?  What became of the family she was stolen from? Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.

Published by https://publerati.com

$17.95 wherever books are sold.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

 
Six-year-old Martha’s world changes abruptly when her mother dies during childbirth. First she must adjust to having no mother and then, when her father remarries, to a second mother. But she never stops missing her first mother, the mother she struggles to remember. Married to her college sweetheart, she anticipates motherhood. Infertility leads to another shift in plans. She and her husband enter the unfamiliar landscape of interracial and intercultural adoption. They adopt an infant son from South Korea and a daughter from Guatemala. Her children’s attitudes toward maternal loss are very different from Martha’s own. During journeys to South Korea to witness her son’s marriage and to Guatemala to vacation and volunteer with her daughter’s Mayan ancestors, she uncovers new understandings of the ties that bind, and restrain, her complicated family.

Reviewers of Missing Mothers have written:

 
 
Available from Barnes and Noble or your independent bookstore.

 
In her latest collection, Louisiana State Poet Laureate Mona Lisa Saloy offers her answer to the enduring question: Who are Black Creoles? These poems are anchored both in Saloy’s ancestral connections and in her lived experiences of remaining a part of this world: cuisine, community, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, pandemic lockdowns, and surviving hurricanes in her Seventh Ward family home that she rebuilt in the long decade after Katrina.

Available everywhere May 23, 2023. Available for preorder now from your favorite independent bookstore.

In her eighties, Sandra Butler does not identify as elderly. Or mature. She’s neither plucky nor a burden, and she’s not over any hills. She’s old and she’s ready to reclaim that word. Butler is not a senior—she’s a mother, a lesbian, a Jew, a feminist, and at times, “a rabble-rousing hectorer.” And now that her time is running out, Butler doesn’t mess around with things that don’t matter. She is supremely motivated, and she’s so much braver than ever before.

In this funny and intensely personal collection of essays, Butler chronicles her experience moving from aging to old, remembering and forgetting all the wrong things, feeling frustrated with technology, keeping up with the avalanche of cultural and political news, mothering two middle-aged daughters, surveying her old body, and ultimately, preparing for her death.

With its sharp humor and refreshing honesty, The Kitchen is Closed is a must-read for everyone who is 60 or older and for those who love them.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

 
The story of two women in 1973 NYC: one, age twenty-three, is despairing and without direction having barely survived the turbulent household of her parents, along with her own adolescent foray into sixties’ hippiedom.

The other, a forty-something Queens, NY wife, mother and survivor of Auschwitz. Thirty years later she battles her own serious and potentially damaging midlife crisis.

Like many folks during the so-called “Me Decade,” the two women indulge in hedonistic and self-destructive activities and then must deal with the consequences. They turn for support to their evolving friendship, and to a cast of characters that includes an idealistic young immigrant who works for a telephone prayer service run by another Holocaust survivor and self-fashioned spiritual guru.

The Rogen Treatment Program – a unique process wherein survivors “experience” the Holocaust again, and through a kind of aversion therapy conquer their individual demons – becomes a major character in the story.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and your independent bookstore.
For more information: www.denisebeck-clark.com

Once a week, seven writers––all retired from professional careers––spent two hours together to discuss what they wrote the previous week. For a number of years prior to 2020, the group met in their homes over coffee. The pandemic changed that. Members could not hug at Zoom meetings.

On May 24, 2020, a white policeman pressed his knee to a Black man’s neck. Other officers looked on with chilling nonchalance. A seventeen-year-old girl captured it all on her cellphone and the world exploded. The process of putting down their thoughts about the cascading events of the year helped the group weather the challenges of 2020 and beyond.

The pieces collected in Writing While Masked are personal––writings of the moment, essays that reflect, detailed timelines and poems that express raw emotion. They include thoughts about what the authors experienced and learned, and what they want for the future. Most of all, they are words of hope.

“Engaging personal views give us what will be seen forever as an historical contribution.”  
        Yvonne Higgins Leach, author, Another Autumn

“I don’t ever want to forget the pandemic’s momentous events, disappointments, and gifts.
This thoughtful book (provides)a reflection and reminder of the unique time in our lives.”
        Ruth Kagi, retired Washington State Representative

“It has been a joy to have been one of the first bookstores to carry Writing While Masked and to see it now become one of our store’s top selling books. Our community has been inspired by this collection.”
        Kalani Kapahua, Manager, Third Place Books, Seattle

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, WSU Press and your independent bookstore.

 

Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery is about a woman who returns to her Midwestern childhood home following the deaths of her parents. A professional translator, the narrator “translates” her life, using the rooms, the objects, Ivy Lodge itself, discovering a new translation of her life. No longer does she view it through the eyes of her parents or siblings, and, as a result, she is at last able to uncover her long-hidden identity, to discover new truths about herself.

Ivy Lodge received a starred review on Kirkus.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

For more information, go to http://lindamurphymarshall.com/.

 
After her husband’s massive heart attack some years ago, Cynthia Hogue began spontaneously writing poems based on dreams and memories that her husband, born into occupied France, had shared with her of being a child growing up in a time of vast wartime and postwar food shortages. When asked by a curious American, members of her extended family in France told never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—a hidden child. Their stories crystallized into instead, it is dark, which Ilya Kaminsky has called “a beautiful spell of a book.” Weaving history of there and present day here in poems that explore how an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry speaks a complex truth, these poems cast a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of the book—love.

Available from Bookshop and Amazon

A disturbing encounter with a hermaphrodite at a county fair presages teenage Miami’s loss of innocence in 1970’s California. MIAMI IN VIRGO is a literary fiction coming-of-age novel narrated by precocious seventeen-year-old Miami.

She and her friends form a tight-knit circle practicing feminist Wiccan ritual, as her childhood fundamentalism casts a long shadow.

Conflicts with her friends over boys threaten their newfound feminist solidarity. An anticipated trip to a women’s demonstration devolves into a nightmarish questioning of her sexuality, further fracturing her friendships. An ill-fated romance at a Halloween party becomes thoroughly spooked when Miami winds up exiled in her new family after her mother’s remarriage.

Her peccadilloes take on a spiritual dimension and she goes through a soul-searing scrutiny which eventually leads to the resolution of her conflicts through the deepening of her character. The twists and turns of her fast-paced story make a compelling read.
 

Learn more about the book and its author: https://miamiinvirgo.com/

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

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.

$20 + $5 each s/h (within the U.S. Please contact for International shipping costs)

Available at etsy.com/shop/dancecoloringbook or julielemberger.com

The Talking Drum weaves the stories of three young couples living near Petite Africa, a fictitious Massachusetts community of African and West Indian immigrants. Issues of gentrification, race, gender, politics, and class inform this propulsive story, but at its heart, it is a novel about whom you love and who becomes your home. A moving and skillful debut.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

 
Based on hundreds of letters exchanged by a couple separated by World War II, this book describes the author’s journey to discover her parents’ past.

The 10th Mountain Division, the army’s first mountaineering unit, led the Allies to victory in Italy in 1945. But, this is not a blood-and-guts battlefield memoir. Instead, from a cache of letters found in the attic of her parents’ home after her father’s death, the author teases out themes which, taken together, opened the door for her to their preoccupations, their anguish and their longing. The story gives ample attention to life on the home front, too.

“This immersive book […] engagingly shines a light on the lives of a soldier and his loved ones.”

       —Kirkus Reviews

An Independent Press Awards “Distinguished Favorite.”

Videos and reader reviews can be found on Amazon and at >austinmacauley.com/book/behind-lines.

Available from Amazon, BN.com, and on order from your independent bookstore.

What These Hands Remember recreates a childhood in rural Idaho and illustrates how the many joys and sorrows of family life centered in the natural world may lead to cherished memories. The poems are dedicated to readers everywhere in hopes that they will find comfort in reclaiming the delights and trials of innocence during these challenging times.

I am grateful for the following words from Kerri Webster, once my student and now my mentor, as well as the author of the collections We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, Grand & Arsenal, Trailhead, and Lapis:

As if I were holding them in the palms of my hands, I offer you these poems for your enjoyment.

Available from Kelsay Books, Amazon.com, or your 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

 
I don’t know about you, but no matter where we’re traveling, especially if we’re having a wonderful time, we invariably stop at the local realtor’s office to peer at the listings and indulge in a one-month rental fantasy. We choose the house we like best, convert the price from euros to dollars, and then fly home and forget entirely about our dream until our next one-week vacation. Except this once.

Other books by Mary Lou Weisman:
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life (HarperCollins)
Traveling While Married (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
My (Middle-Aged) Baby Book (Workman Publishing)
Intensive Care: A Family Love Story (Random House/iUniverse)

www.marylouweisman.com

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

“I don’t have words strong enough to convey the depth of feeling these stories aroused in me. Painful, poignant, wistful, evocative, hopeful, sensual, tragic . . . real. Simply stunning.”

Trees are silent witnesses to the passing of time, guardians of myth and memory, metaphors of life.

About the book:

Each of the thirteen stories in this collection has a tree of particular importance to its characters and their communities. These are tales of childhood and imagination, of migration and struggle, conflict and change. They are about specific places in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the U.S., and real and imagined sites of cultural encounter, growth and adaptation.

“After I finished reading Kathy Taylor’s “Trees and Other Witnesses” I felt like I was leaving behind a dear friend, one I was not yet ready to say goodbye to.”

“From the opening page, I was drawn into these stories by Taylor’s poetic and meditative voice.”

Available from Austin Macauley Publishers, from Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

COLORADO AUTHORS LEAGUE FINALIST 2022

Available from https://www.sulimamalzin.net or from your independent bookstore.

When newly engaged Sally Buffington is introduced to Craigville, she meets an expansive Cape Cod cottage that is virtually a family member itself. She quickly finds herself competing for airtime among the talkative, assured band of brothers—and her new mother-in-law, the cottage’s lively and confounding matriarch.

Sally, a Cape Cod local, soon wonders how she’ll ever maintain her independence, let alone her sense of self when the day’s agenda and every detail is already set in stone. But she navigates her new life with quiet persistence and a boundless curiosity that guides her to explore life through the creative lens of her camera and her pen.

Sally writes with a whimsical candor that is both honest and humorous. Through poetic prose and heartfelt reflection, A Place Like This reveals the beauty of Cape Cod and shows us that sometimes the simplest of moments brings us the most lasting joy.

Sally Buffington is a writer and photographer, also a classically trained musician. From her home in southern California, she migrates back to native ground in Massachusetts, especially her spiritual homeland of Cape Cod. Writing lyrically and imaginatively, ever aware of sensory experience and memory, Buffington takes the reader into her thoughts wherever she finds herself.

Buffington can “see things other people don’t see” in everyday scenes and find them beautiful. But her prose is where that ability most shines through. This memoir paints a vivid and lasting memory of a home with as much personality as the family who lived there.

“Punctuated by sensory delights, the author’s prose can prove particularly mouthwatering” …. “An elegantly observant account that transports readers to a beloved place.”

To learn more, and order the book, go to Amazon or www.sallybuffington.com