Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Upcoming, new, and noted books (listed in order of date of publication).
Geri Lipschultz, Grace Before the Fall, DarkWinter Press, August 2025, literary fiction (novel)
Grace Before the Fall is a reminder that every girl has a little Joan of Arc in her wheelhouse. It is the time of the hostage crisis in Iran, and in New York City, it is long before the fall of the towers, just before AIDS has found itself a name, although young men are mysteriously dying, and Grace Rosinbloom is inheriting their furniture. In Geri Lipschultz’s virtual love letter to the metropolis, Grace—a former actor, a former grad student, currently a civil servant by default—becomes a lover with a mission, an accidental activist whose search for love and meaning opens up doors to her dreamworld. Here is a picaresque novel that veers into magic realism as it enters the mind of a woman called upon to take a stand.
Laura Cresté, In The Good Years, Four Way Books, September 2025, poetry
Laura Cresté’s lyric poems of ordinary years—waitressing at a dive bar, growing tomato plants, groundhogs in the backyard—interweave with the history of her family’s escape from Argentina’s military dictatorship. As Four Way’s editors note, “These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence.” Eduardo C. Corral raves, “Cresté deftly braids familial narratives, political violence, translation, guilt, and survival into a tour de force that jolts the senses.” Ocean Vuong says, “There are books that stain you long after you put them down. In the Good Years is one of these books; it haunts you, in the best ways… The whole world is here.”
Kristyn J. Saunders, Slipstream, Walleah Press, September 2025, poetry
Slipstream is a sequence of poems and short form text registering a parent’s shifting interiority during a young adult child’s psychiatric hospitalisation. Its interwoven forms look back through histories of mental healthcare, troubling the everyday, embodied, and institutional edges of its immense present. Through its redactive practice and miscellany of salvaged and imagined moments, Slipstream maps a late season of maternal care, creating an open, generative space for readers to inhabit.
Kimberly Ann Priest, Wolves in Shells, University of Nebraska Press, October 2025, poetry
Wolves in Shells is a modern monomyth telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness, trauma, and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner. Reflecting on her familial heritage, this survivor grapples with the way she, the women of her history, and her daughter have been conditioned to accommodate the demands of the male ego and predation. Reflective, clear-eyed, and incisive, the poems of Wolves in Shells feature O-Six, a wolf born into the rewilding territory of Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s who serves as a metaphor for women who must cope with violence and survive on their own. Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones,” the narrative considers how survival requires a balance of protectiveness, risk, trust, and escape.
Maria Giura, If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, Bordighera Press, November 2025, poetry
In Maria Giura’s If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she’s made of childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost love and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents’ Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them “still fighting, / still making us, / still together,” then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to “spread out their blankets / and live.” Moving between New York and Italy, between family and “stranger,” these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father “waiting for her on the corner… / bread in his hand” to the sister who “pulled the music out of her, / helped her make her own song.” Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.
Terese Svoboda, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, OR Books, November 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
One of the first women hired by CBS Radio, Pat Lochridge was the only female journalist to cover both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of WWII. She interviewed Hermann Göring twice, climbed to Hitler’s redoubt at Eagle’s Nest, was a friend of FDR, and the postwar mayor of Berchtesgaden. Sometimes even her four sons questioned the validity of their mother’s stories. The first time she met her daughter-in-law (author Terese Svoboda), Pat showed her a photo of herself and a pile of ashes and said the US command had asked her to identify them as Hitler’s. Threaded with dark humor and personal reflection, this memoir explores the stories we inherit and the ones we invent, the official histories we parrot, and the quiet manipulations we accept. From Cold War propaganda and McCarthy-era paranoia to newsroom sexism and the strange theater of postwar art-world politics, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law reveals a life extraordinary—and perhaps crafted. With sharp insight, Svoboda unpacks the contradictions embedded in such a narrative, weaving in reflections on her own experiences in journalism, family, and the uneasy inheritance of truth-through-marriage.
Kim Danielson, Piece by Piece: A Life Remembered through Things Lost, She Writes Press, January 2026, creative nonfiction (memoir)
A fresh take on the loss memoir, Piece by Piece follows a middle-aged mother forced to reconcile the theft of precious keepsakes with the memories and people the items represent, especially her beloved mother. Perfect for anyone who has ever lost anything of meaningful value, this book provides solace and a new perspective on material possessions. A practical template for preserving a legacy with or without artifacts, Piece by Piece offers a unique take on loss through the lens of stolen objects and invites readers to tell the stories of their lives by telling the stories of their things.