Tag: AWP EVENTS

About Realizing River City

by Melissa Grunow
Tumbleweed Books
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"A deeply rich meditation on what it means to be a woman in a sometimes uncertain and complicated world, in relationship to men, but ultimately, and more importantly, to oneself. Melissa Grunow's REALIZING RIVER CITY raises just as many questions as it answers, circling back always, in beautiful prose and a clear, honest voice, to what it means to be alive, to love, and to be present for all of it."
—Amina Cain, author of Creature and I Go to Some Hollow

"Realizing River City is the compelling story of Melissa Grunow’s search for love with all the wrong men. It’s a story about loss, love, compassion, and finally redemption, as Grunow learns to stand on her own, embrace life’s messiness, and forge ahead full of hope for the future. I was cheering for her as I turned the final pages!"
—Kate Hopper, author of Ready for Air and Use Your Words

"Melissa Grunow has written an intimate exploration of need, desire, doubt, and survival; her memoir is remarkable for its heart-breaking honesty."
—Robert Root, author of Happenstance and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Places

"Empowering. Beautiful. Brave. These three words are the epitome of Melissa Grunow’s REALIZING RIVER CITY. Traversing through personal transformations, the strength that lives within her memoir stems from Grunow’s fresh writing and unrelenting honesty. She doesn’t hold back when showing us the complexities of what it means and what it looks like to become an independent woman. This is a book about liberation. This is a book about revolution. This is a book that will live in your body long after you have finished it, a book that will embolden your life, always."
–Chelsey Clammer, author of BodyHome and ​Circadian

"In her memoir REALIZING RIVER CITY, Melissa Grunow shares with honesty and clarity the often-precarious landscape of love, loss, and longing. Her book offers readers vibrant details of New Mexico and an intimate glimpse into a woman’s persistent search for acceptance and positive relationships."
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Crafting the Personal Essay

At times, life can feel like a challenging feat of survival. Whether it’s living through abusive relationships or figuring out the complexities of what it means to be a woman searching for love, REALIZING RIVER CITY is a memoir that proves how despite the troubles we may face, there is hope in the way we continually risk ourselves in search for the life we want to live. In her poetic exploration of past relationships, Melissa Grunow’s honest words do not falter in the face of so much loss. Taking the rage we all feel about grief and pain, and funneling it into truth, beauty, and ultimately redemption on each page, REALIZING RIVER CITY is about discovering how the most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves. Purchase Realizing River City.

About Melissa Grunow

Melissa Grunow is the author of Realizing River City (Tumbleweed Books, 2016) which won Second Place-Nonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards and the Silver Medal Award-Memoir from the Readers' Favorites International Book Competition. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and listed in the Best American Essays 2016 notables. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction with distinction from National University. Visit her website at melissagrunow.com or follow her on Twitter @melgrunow.

About Puzzle Pieces

by Bernard Grant
Paper Nautilus Press
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PRAISE

Like the identities he addresses in each of his essays, Bernard Grant’s Puzzle Pieces is full of shifts and movement. Whether he’s looking at gender, race, class, or ability, Grant uses language in an honest and fierce way to engage with the intricacies of his life. This, in turn, reveals the complexities of what it means to be alive. With impressive precision, Grant’s writing does more than tell a story, but creates a powerful experience that becomes a part of the reader’s life.

– Chelsey Clammer, author of BodyHome

Puzzle Pieces by Bernard Grant is as intimate in voice as it is oceanic in scope. The work thrives in paradox with short-form essays that speak to what is timeless and what is current in the same breath. How is it possible to plumb the human heart, the physical body, and the cultural landscape in a single, slender volume? I don't know how, but I know this writer has done it, with linguistic grace and emotional authenticity.

– Julie Marie Wade, author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures and When I Was Straight: Poems

Reader, beware. The stories in Bernard Grant’s Puzzle Pieces start quietly enough, but they come at you fast, loaded for bear, to make “visible the threat of mortality” that hangs over everything we do. Grant is a master of understated suspense: the sentence, like the scene, is often terse, fragmented—the sliver of image, the shard of action—each word, every breath calibrated to deliver a piece of the picture of what it is to live in this mortal coil, haunted with pain and the strategies we adopt to delay or defeat it, if only temporarily. We see precisely how “it’s hard to be a black kid in a white subculture,” we wonder whether “loneliness is a condition not an affliction.” Through birth and death and back again, a quiet dignity emerges from these spare stories, true grit layered with unassuming grace.

– Kevin Craft, Editor of Poetry Northwest

Puzzle Pieces, winner of The Paper Nautilus Debut Series Chapbook Award, is a collection of micro lyric essays that follows the narrator through his observations about the body and health–his own and those around him. Purchase Puzzle Pieces.

About Bernard Grant

Bernard Grant is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a Yates Fellow. He's also received residency and fellowship support from The Anderson Center, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Mineral School. He's the author of two prose chapbooks, Puzzle Pieces (Paper Nautilus Press) and Fly Back at Me (Publications), and his stories and essays have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, New Delta Review, and The Chicago Tribune Printers Row, among others. He currently serves as associate essays editor at The Nervous Breakdown.