2017 Books & Authors
WTAW Press announces its inaugural titles published September 14, 2017
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Books and e-books are available for purchase here.
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Read an interview with Mike Smith here and with Louise Marburg here.
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Download readers' guides here. We offer special discounts for book clubs. View ordering information here.
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AND THERE WAS EVENING AND THERE WAS MORNING
ESSAYS ON ILLNESS, LOSS, AND LOVE
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Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
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A moving nonfiction debut by Mississippi Delta poet Mike Smith. This memoir-in-essays tracks the loss of Smith’s first wife to cancer after the birth of the second child, offering a portrait of marriage, family, and tragedy. In honest, and at times darkly comic terms, Smith documents the strange set of coincidences between his first wife's illness and his stepdaughter's similar battle the year his second marriage began, and examines blended families, remarriage, helping children find ways to cope with the loss of a parent, and the influence of spirituality upon loss.
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling, says "What a gift Mike Smith has given us..."His prose is nuanced, his voice considered and considerate, his wisdom hard-earned but never bitter. There is beauty and solace here and gorgeous imagery. Smith has written a book for all of us who are dying—which is to say, all of us who are living, and our lives will be the better for having read it."
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Author Julianna Baggott's writes: "What I love most is that this isn't a book about learning to let go but instead learning that the heart can expand to hold more love..."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in the mountains of West Virginia and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, Mike Smith graduated from the University of North Carolina, received his MA from Hollins College, and received his MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame. He has published three collections of poetry, including Byron and Baghdad and Multiverse, a collection of two anagrammatic cycles, and his translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012. He is co-editor of the anthology, Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text, published by Columbia University Press. Recently, the critic Robert Archambeau has called Mike “the American poet of my generation most clearly writing in a Byronic mode.” For the last seven years, he has lived with his second wife Jennifer, their five children, deep in the Mississippi Delta. By day, he is an associate professor of English and directs the Honors Program at Delta State University.
THE TRUTH ABOUT ME: STORIES
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Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award for Short Story
Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
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A fiction debut of extraordinary stories by New York writer Louise Marburg, in which shortcomings, secrets, and inventions turn notions of love and self upside down. No matter what their station in life, the characters in these wry and moving stories face moments in which the shock of being and becoming comes from within. Of Marburg’s work, acclaimed short story writer Richard Bausch says her “characters go through the shifts and sunderings of life in vivid and lyrically direct prose, and your blood jumps.”
Antonya Nelson writes "[the] author’s capacious heart has room for a vast array of very different characters, each of whom receives the fully serious respect and sympathy in the telling of his or her story. In this way, every reader can find "me" here, not to mention truth."
"These are smart and lovely stories, perceptive, compassionate, and sometimes shocking. Who are these people, so helpless in the currents that surround them? Marburg reveals their cowardice, their flaws, and their deep capacities to engage the heart," says Roxana Robinson.
​ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Marburg studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds a Master’s Degree in Fiction from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her stories have been published in Cold Mountain Review, The Lascaux Review Prize Anthology, Necessary Fiction, and other publications. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City and Connecticut with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg, and their three French Bulldogs.
