Raising Panic
Rhonda Zimlich

Raising Panic, the 2023 Book Award recipient from Steel Toe Books is set in 1978, a time of Ditto jeans and rabbit’s foot keychains. Sisters PJ and Panic McCormack navigate the challenges of an alcoholic home, witness a historic plane crash, and unravel family secrets as they struggle to escape their rural valley.

No Visible Bruises:
What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
Rachel Louise Snyder

In No Visible Bruises, author Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths—that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously, that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. No Visible Bruises was awarded the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the 2020 Book Tube Prize, the 2020 New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Sidney Hillman Book Award for social justice. It won Best Book in Translation in Taiwan in 2021 and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. It was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, the Library Journal, the Economist, and BookPage; the New York Times included it in their “Top Ten” books of 2019. No Visible Bruises was also a finalist for the Kirkus Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Silver Gavel Award.

The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place
Andrew Bertaina

The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024) is a series of essays about the trials and tribulations of midlife: parenting, divorce, identity, and meaning. The collection was listed as one of the best of 2024 by The Independent Review of Books and received a starred review from Kirkus.

Imposter Syndrome & Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim
Patricia Park

Imposter Syndrome & Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim by Patricia Park (Random House Children’s 2023) is a humorous coming-of-age about a Korean Argentinian American teen navigating life, grief, and the college admissions process at Quaker Oats Prep. Imposter Syndrome was named NPR’s Best YA Books of the Year and a Gotham Book Prize Finalist; it is taught in middle schools and high schools across the country.

Ice: Poems
David Keplinger

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt.

"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history, too) in an effort to understand modern life."
—New York Times Book Review

“Ice… shifts gracefully from geological epochs to intimate moments. In the opening poem, locals are searching for a mammoth tusk. Later, we see a grandmother mending socks. Glaciers collapse in the warming climate, while far away a mother reads Emily Dickinson on her deathbed. What does it mean to live in these latter days when ‘we run false hope / as if it were a red light’?
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

One Person Away from You
Andrew Bertaina

One Person Away from You (University of Arkansas Press 2021) won the Moon City Press Award in Fiction in 2020. One Person Away from You is a collection of stories that oscillates between the fantastic and the familiar: for every woman who turns into a swan, there’s a man who bungles a romantic relationship in Italy; for every sky that rains a torrent of laughter, there’s a husband reminiscing about his honeymoon. Above all, the stories explore our common lot of lostness and longing, our question of whether our life and loves are the right ones or the product of some cosmic error. Whether it’s a sea appearing suddenly in a bone dry valley, an angel musing on his relationship with a mortal woman, or a narrator yearning for an absent lover the deeply emotional stories search for meaning. Throughout this collection, characters and entire towns search through the constructs of identity, time, fairy tales, and love letters, to find the flicker of constancy in the sea of change that is human life.

Anagnorisis: Poems
Kyle Dargan

In Anagnorisis: Poems, the award-winning poet Kyle Dargan ignites a reckoning. From the depths of his rapidly changing home of Washington, DC, the poet is both enthralled and provoked, having witnessed-on a digital loop running in the background of Barack Obama's unlikely presidency—the rampant state-sanctioned murder of fellow African Americans. He is pushed toward the same recognition articulated by James Baldwin decades earlier: that an African American may never be considered an equal in citizenship or humanity. Winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Happy Land
Dolen Perkins-Valdez

"Dolen Perkins-Valdez has the range, depth, and vision to capture the dreams of a people on the pages of a novel. Happy Land is exactly the novel we need right here, right now. Accompanied by the musical speech of the American south, Perkins-Valdez sings a song to remind us that freedom is worth fighting for." — Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author

"Picture a time when a kingdom existed inside the confines of the Carolinas, a time when freed people were royalty. What if that was your history, instead of the trauma of enslavement and generational poverty? As Dolen Perkins-Valdez says in this astonishing, historical-based novell, a family tree isn't just something you draw on paper." — Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

The World to Come
David Keplinger

Winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize. The prose poems of The World to Come are an investigation of possible and impossible realities, where the fields of science and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, intersect as they once did in the medieval mystical traditions. The worlds of its title are those of weather, the imagination, literature, planetary systems, and other dimensions, and an extension of Dante’s visit to the concentric spheres.

Re Jane: A Novel
Patricia Park

Re Jane by Patricia Park (Viking, Penguin Random House 2015) is an award-winning retelling of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, reimagined as a Korean American bildungsroman set in NYC and Seoul. Re Jane was named New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an American Library Association Award winner, an NPR “Fresh Air,” Oprah Magazine, and BBC pick; it is taught widely in high schools and university courses in contemporary literature, Victorian and American lit, Asian American Studies, and satire and retellings.

Women We Buried,
Women We Burned:
A Memoir
Rachel Louise Snyder

For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women’s lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burnedis her own story. Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place. A piercing account of Snyder’s journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned won the 2024 Independent Book Award and was named a “Best Book” of the year from Kirkus and Oprah daily.

Wench: A Novel
Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s enchanting and unforgettable novel, based on little-known fact, combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. Wench: A Novel received the First Novelist Award from the ALA Black Caucus.