Winona Kent: Ticket to Ride
In 1974, top UK band Figgis Green was riding high in the charts with their blend of traditional Celtic ballads mixed with catchy, folky pop. One of their biggest fans was sixteen-year old Pippa Gladstone, who mysteriously vanished while she was on holiday with her parents in Spain in March that same year.
Paul Coccia: On the Line
Thirteen-year-old basketball star Jordan Ryker feels like his life is falling apart. All Jordie wanted was for his parents to stop fighting. Soon, he gets his wish. His parents separate and then his dad announces he’s gay.
Rhett Davis: Hovering
The city was in the same place. But was it the same city? Alice stands outside her family’s 1950s red brick veneer, unsure if she should approach. It has been sixteen years, but it’s clear she is out of options. Lydia opens the door to a familiar stranger – thirty-nine, tall, bony, pale. She knows her sister immediately. But something isn’t right.
Gabrielle Prendergast: The Overwood
Blue and his Faerie friends race through the snowy winter streets of the city as they follow clues and face challenges both magical and human, desperately trying to find Blue’s mom and her wicked captor. But they have no idea what Queen Olea has in store for them.
Suzanne Kamata: Waiting
Suzanne Kamata attended Lexington High School with Sharon Faye “Shari” Smith, who was murdered in 1985 by Larry Gene Bell. This crime compelled the writing of “Waiting.”
Christopher Evans: Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth
Christopher Evans’s stories are people with strays — those who fall for the allure of nostalgia, grapple with male fragility, deny family trauma, and acquiesce to authority. For these characters, resignation and reinvention are only a breath apart.
Catherine Young: Geosmin
Catherine Young’s poems journey through earth, water, tree, and stone, the heartbreak and beauty of seasons across a rural year, and take a panoramic view of aging.
Danielle Daniel: Forever Birchwood
With gorgeous yet understated language, Danielle Daniel beautifully captures an urgent and aching time in a young person’s life. To read this astonishing middle-grade debut is to have your heart broken and then tenderly mended.
E. David Brown: Nothing is Us
Told in a novelistic style complete with climax and denouement and the imagery and tension of fiction, it deals with racism in the U.S. South, Kennedy’s assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, student response to the war in Viet Nam, military culture, and the destructive cult of blind American patriotism.
Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr: Flood Season
After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to poetry. His début Flood Season explores diasporic lives, the tensions between who we are and the clichés that surround our nation states, and hybridity. These are poems that carry their weight easily, fizz with the joy of a burst man.