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.
Margaret Nowaczyk: Chasing Zebras
From leaving Communist Poland to enduring the demands of medical school, through living with a long undiagnosed mental illness to discovering the fascinating field of genetics, plunging into the pressures of prenatal diagnosis and finally finding the tools of writing and of narrative medicine, Margaret shares a journey that is both inspiring and harrowing.
Aaron Bushkowsky: Water Proof
A dark, rousing comedy set in and around the Pacific Northwest, Water Proof is a story about infidelity, film-making, and the search for a missing kayaker.
Conor Kerr: Avenue of Champions
Set in Edmonton, this story considers Indigenous youth in relation to the urban constructs and colonial spaces in which they survive—from violence, whitewashing, trauma and racism to language revitalization, relationships with Elders, restaking land claims and ultimately, triumph.
Natasha Silva: North Star Heart
A collection of poetry divided into three sections, North Star Heart, is a powerful journey of self-discovery, a reclamation of roots, and a beacon for the dreams of the future delivered through the eyes of a Portuguese-Canadian.