From Our Authors | April 17, 2018

Here’s a sampler of what some of our past TMR contributors have been up to in recent months:

Camille T. Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Dungy’s poetry has twice appeared in our pages: in TMR 24.3 (Winter 2001), and in TMR 27.2 (Fall 2004). Dungy’s book is a collection of moving essays centering on motherhood, traveling with a young daughter, interactions with strangers, and how her experiences intersect with issues of race and womanhood. Edwidge Danticat called the book “a stunningly beautiful love letter from a mother to her daughter to help her daughter embrace the world she lives in, to introduce her to her ancestors, and prepare her for the future.”   You can read an interview with Dungy here.

Shara Lessley’s second poetry collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, was published in March by the Wisconsin Poetry Series. TMR published selections from the book in 34.3 (Fall 2011). Lessley’s collection explores her displacement in a different country, motherhood, and questions of culture and humanity in powerful, carefully sculpted lines. You can visit Lessley online here.

Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut poetry collection, Rail, will be published by BOA Editions Ltd. on April 24. Carlson-Wee was our 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize winner in poetry. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, whose poetry has appeared widely. You can visit him online and find interviews and videos here.

James A. McLaughlin’s new book, Bearskin (Ecco, June 12, 2018), is a gritty thriller from start to finish. McLaughlin’s gripping novella of the same title, about a forest-preserve caretaker learning about bear poaching, was published in The Missouri Review 31.2 and won our 2008 William Peden Prize for best-of-volume fiction. The forthcoming novel continues the story of the caretaker, Rice Moore, as his investigations of the bear-poaching incidents lead him back into trouble with an Arizona drug cartel and a past he’s hiding from. Bearskin is a Barnes and Noble Summer 2018 Discover Great New Writers selection.  You can find McLaughlin’s images and news online here.