Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Lisa Marie Oliver, Birthroot, Glass Lyre Press, December 2024, poetry (chapbook)
The poems in Birthroot explore themes of new motherhood, loss, renewal and the natural world. This chapbook follows the first months of pregnancy, through birth and toddlerhood—a time period that includes the loss of marriage, postpartum anxiety, wildfires, and family grief. Throughout the poems, the link between mother and child is revelatory, transformative and rooted in the natural world that surrounds them.
Rebe Huntman, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, Monkfish Book Publishing, February 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
Writing with a physicality of language that moves like the body in dance, Rebe Huntman, a poet, choreographer, and dancer, embarks on a pilgrimage into the mysteries of the gods and saints of Cuba and their larger spiritual view of the Mother. Huntman offers a window into the extraordinary world of Afro-Cuban gods and ghosts and the dances and rituals that call them forth. As she explores the memory of her own mother, interlacing it with her search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads us into a world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, which resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself.
Nicole Callihan, SLIP, Saturnalia Books, March 2025, poetry
Inventive and dynamic, Nicole Callihan’ s fourth poetry collection, SLIP, navigates midlife with stick in hand and tongue in cheek. As Ellen Bass writes, Callihan “turns recurrent obsessions like children, husband, mother, laundry, time, art, and body into poems of elastic syntax and shapes—psalms, prose, lyric, narrative.” Whether looking back at her girlhood, counting out almonds, or singing herself (yet another) birthday song, Callihan’s luminous linguistics send us on an expansive journey. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes raucous, these poems teach us how much can be held in a life and on the page.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Mothersalt, Alice James Books, May 2025, poetry
Mothersalt by Mia Ayumi Malhotra explores the ways in which the lyric self is split apart and stitched back together through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Through fragmentary forms inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book and the miscellany prose diaries of medieval Japan, Mothersalt brings careful, devoted attention to the labor and resilience involved in bearing and caring for young children, transforming the dimensions of the everyday and revealing its ephemeral beauty.
Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad, Where Do You Live?أين تعيشين؟, Arrowsmith Press, May 2025, poetry
Where Do You Live? is a bilingual, collaborative collection of questions and responses in Arabic and English, written and co-translated by Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and American poet Jennifer Jean—with the aid of Iraqi translators Tamara Al-Attiya and Wadaq Qais. In this intensely intimate book, poet talks to poet, and poem talks to poem. The process of the book’s creation is a profound gesture towards peace and healing by women who believe in the enduring power of open-hearted dialogue. The “where” in question isn’t limited to a physical space but to the places minds and souls linger or reside.
Brittany Micka-Foos, It’s No Fun Anymore, Apprentice House Press, June 2025, literary fiction (short stories)
It’s No Fun Anymore is a haunting collection of eight stories, reaching into the darkest corners of modern womanhood to illuminate themes of trauma, identity, and the elusiveness of safety in our capitalist society. A stay-at-home mother takes inspiration from a 1950s self-help book in a desperate attempt to reclaim her agency. A marriage implodes under the weight of a shampoo-sales pyramid scheme. The specter of generational trauma haunts a new mom in the delivery room. These stories juxtapose the everyday with the uncanny across diverse territories, from anime conventions to kindergarten classrooms. The result is an eerie familiarity, an intensity that lingers long after the final page.
Christine Kalafus, Flood: A Memoir, Woodhall Press, June 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
Christine is pregnant with twins and recovering from the betrayal of her husband’s affair when her right breast engages in a mutiny. After delivering identical boys and a tumor on the same day, she believes the worst is over. Until the natural spring under her house—what the neighborhood kids call The Witch House—begins to rise. Intimate, heartbreaking, and hilarious, Flood is one woman’s liquid desire to protect her home, her family, and herself.
Susan Norman, Risk: A Life Saved by the River, She Writes Press, June 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
A unique glimpse into one of the world’s most challenging competitive adventure sports, Risk is a fast-paced and compelling story about a whitewater world champion who becomes a first-time mother after menopause. Weaving stories from her life as an elite athlete with her experiences as a late-in-life mom, Sue Norman crafts a riveting narrative about the challenges of navigating class five rapids—and parenting an at-risk child.
Kalehua Kim, Mele, Trio House Press, July 2025, poetry
Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word “mele”—a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor’s Choice Prize, Kim’s debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgment, and commemoration. The poems reflect on what we inherit and how who we become is intertwined with who our parents were and are, and the pain of facing that reality: “One day your voice will become mine, Ka leo o maua / Though I am not prepared for your end….” With this mele, Kim honors the memory of a lost mother, as well as the struggles of a daughter as she becomes a wife and mother herself, while honoring her roots and forging a new path.
Martheaus Perkins, The Grace of Black Mothers, Trio House Press, July 2025, poetry
Carried within Martheaus Perkins’ The Grace of Black Mothers are the many howls of lost children and their martyrized mothers. This debut collection brings a lyrical reckoning on behalf of dismembered dreams by boldly finding grace through our Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. The work invites the reader into a yard where “whisper-thin soul-jazz drips over America” to flip through a Nile-long family album. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author’s own mothers guide us as we “wander streets like cartographers of poverty” and hold our “promises to come home.” Perkins shows his craft by shapeshifting through fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, social media threads, and forms that embody dreams themselves. The Grace of Black Mothers is a collection drenched in complexity and nuance: homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure.
Susan Buttenwieser, Junction of Earth and Sky, Manilla Press (UK), August 2025, literary fiction (novel)
Coming of age in 1940s England, Alice’s life is thrown into chaos under the shadow of the war. Forced to let go of her hopes and dreams, she finds herself uprooted to America and a life she never could have imagined. Decades later, it is the 1990s and Alice’s granddaughter Marnie is living out of a worn-out Chevy Nova, running heroin and cocaine along the New England coastline. Yet she carries with her memories of a nurtured childhood in hardscrabble Rhode Island, where all the disappointments of her young parents were eclipsed by her grandmother’s love. Spanning six decades and two continents, from the shores of WWII England to the underside of 1990s America, Junction of Earth and Sky unfolds—in multiple timelines—the enduring bond of grandmother and granddaughter, plagued by the past but determined to find their place in the world against all the odds.
Christy Lee Barnes, Commodore Rookery, Finishing Line Press, August 2025, poetry (chapbook)
Commodore Rookery tells a small story of survival, resilience, and healing. In the wake of a traumatic labor, breastfeeding struggles, postpartum insomnia, and Covid isolation, Barnes finds unexpected solace in taking her infant son on daily visits to the local blue heron colony. Through concise, image-driven poetry, she captures and honors her own early matrescence—the process of becoming a mother—in dreams, fairy tales, daily walks, and 4:00 am feedings. This is not just a postpartum or a pandemic story; it is a story for anyone who’s been forced to painfully shed old skin to find a stronger, softer, more brilliant creature beneath.