Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me, McClelland & Stewart, March 2026, poetry
In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.
Crystal AJ Smith, Gitwaałtk, Gordon Hill Press, April 2026, literary fiction (novel)
Gitwaałtk tells the story of a young Indigenous woman who loses her Sister-Cousin to the Highway of Tears and embarks on a journey with her nux nux (spiritual beings) to find—and bring to justice—the person responsible. Weaving prose, poetry, and oral tradition, Smith’s novel traces a path through grief toward healing, where family, community, and culture become sources of strength and reclamation. The story is at once a personal act of remembrance and a larger statement on resistance, love, and spiritual continuity.
Veronica Kornberg, Strange Gift, Wandering Aengus Press, April 2026, poetry
Strange Gift is a full-length collection of poems centered on the experiences of girls and women as they strive to create a home for themselves in the world, across generations and within themselves. These are lyric, narrative poems, rich in detail, that honor the strength and pain of women as they navigate a full embrace of their lives. The book is a braided journey through surprising, sometimes surreal landscapes of connection and rupture—the questioning voice of Emily Dickinson materializing in a dark cubbyhole, the search for a mother’s misplaced teeth, laughter among sisters in roadside motel, or a woman alone, whispering poems in a midnight garden. Taken together, the poems offer a portrait of female fortitude and joy, and a commitment to never looking away.
Molly Fisk, Walking Wheel, Red Hen Press, April 2026, poetry (novel-in-verse)
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless. Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie’s baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple’s first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.
Maria Giesbrecht, A Little Feral, Write Bloody Publishing, May 2026, poetry
In A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht delivers a debut collection that navigates faith, family, and personal resurrection through a voice at once wild, intimate, and quietly rebellious. Written in the aftermath of leaving a conservative Mennonite upbringing, these poems chart a parallel journey of breaking away— from father, from God, from the confines of obedience. Giesbrecht’ s language is lyrical and unflinching, a cadence that moves between tenderness and defiance, weaving ancestral memory with moments of stark revelation. A Little Feral asks readers to reimagine where holiness might be found— in the fractures of family, in the undoing of inherited faith, and even in the loneliness of a world shaped by patriarchy and exile.
Mum’s the Word, Edited by Maria Coletta McLean and Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli, Guernica Editions, May 2026, creative nonfiction (essays)
Everyone has a mother. What if that mother was wonderful? Good. What if that mother was not the mother shown on sweet Mother’s Day cards, featured in ads, shown in Hallmark movies? What if a collection about mothers included more than just tributes? What if the collection was honest, inclusive, and thought-provoking? The editors set out to gather these kinds of stories from published authors who were willing to share their experiences. The result was Mum’s the Word, thirteen tales dealing with everything from missing mothers to regretful mothers to embarrassing mothers to redefined mothers.