 The best way to end September is to finish the month with an evening featuring three of the smartest women we know. On September 28, 2022 at 5:30PM (Pacific) via Zoom, we have the pleasure of listening to a combination of poetry, memoir, and fiction. Please join us. And before you do, take a minute to learn a bit about our featured writers.  Lizz Schumer is the senior staff writer for Good Housekeeping, Prevention, and Woman’s Day and her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPo, Bon Appetit, The Spruce, VinePair, SELF, and others. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goddard College and is also the author of Buffalo Steel (Black Rose Writing 2013). Her essays, poetry, fiction, and hybrid text have appeared in Punchnel’s, Wordgathering, Ploughshares.com, Ghost City Review, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere. She teaches journalism and communications courses as an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Professional Studies and as a writing consultant at the NYC Writer’s Room. BIOGRAPHY OF A BODY is a lyrical meander through the development of a messy, flawed, imperfect human and what it means to live in a society that both pulls a person into itself and fiercely pushes back. In personal essays and snippets of verse that shift back and forth through time and place, it fidgets with the puzzle pieces of a life that are at once starkly unique and glaringly obvious. The narrator probes the influence of religion on a person’s psychological development, how the legacy of traditional femininity works their way under her skin, and the many pitfalls of living in a body that doesn’t always conform to expectations, both from within and the world pressing on it.  Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and multi-genre writer living in Central Pennsylvania. Graduate of University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television Production and San Diego State University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, her writing and films work to subvert the toxic cultural narratives endorsed by popular media and the institutions that profit from stigmatizing and disadvantaging marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Her writing was included in the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for various awards, including Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. A former DGA assistant director for television, she is currently Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University, where she serves as production faculty for narrative filmmaking. Her hybrid chapbook/concept album, Blood Histories, was published by Galileo Press in 2021. A 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize Nominee, The Year of the Monster (2022) explores American culture as commodity and comorbidity. From black holes and animal extinctions to death row trauma porn and the redacted scripts of Hollywood abuses: these sixteen stories subvert traditional notions of justice, challenge vulnerable characters to survive in transgressive spaces. Mixing traditional prose with screenplay and script-hybrid, and certainly not without hope, The Year of the Monster encourages close examination of how American media and our complicity in its marriage of violence and culture perpetuate the human and environmental crises.  Jennifer Sparkman is an expert in the film industry as well as a profession al writer and magazine publisher. Her chapbook LET'S BREAKUP was released in 2018 and explores the aftermath of profound loss.
 PORTLAND, OR; September 27, 2022-- The Year of the Monster explores American culture as commodity and comorbidity. From black holes and animal extinctions to death row trauma porn and the redacted scripts of Hollywood abuses: these sixteen stories subvert traditional notions of justice, challenge vulnerable characters to survive in transgressive spaces. Mixing traditional prose with screenplay and script-hybrid, and certainly not without hope, The Year of the Monster encourages close examination of how American media and our complicity in its marriage of violence and culture perpetuate the human and environmental crises.
Praise for Tara Stillions Whitehead “If you mix a cocktail of Octavia Butler, Mary Robison, and early Jayne Anne Phillips, you might get something approaching Tara Stillions Whitehead’s style. Yet her style is highly original and all her own: shape-shifting and subtle. Her language packs real power. The stories in The Year of the Monster deal with love and unlove, math and physics, deception, truth, and loss – – both personal and cultural. As they navigate life’s obstacles – both spiritual and societal -- her characters show resilience and stamina even when darkness looms. “God and Laundry” is one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. But read them all, every story – from cover to cover. The entire collection sparkles.” —Larry Fondation, Martyrs and Holymen “With a deftness and economy of language that calls to mind Etgar Keret, and a tender veil of grit and glamor reminiscent of the late Eve Babitz, Tara Stillions Whitehead’s The Year of the Monster is cinematic, and captivating. In sixteen stories, ranging from a jarring back-and-forth between movie execs, and an intimate, sultry portrayal of a community ripped apart and renewed by a tornado, Stillions Whitehead’s writing demonstrates an unending capacity for humanity, the kind that is necessary right now. It has to be said: The Year of the Monster is officially required reading.” —Shannon Wolf, Green Card Girl "The stories in The Year of the Monster are tender, truthful, fiery and finely wrought. Tara Stillions Whitehead has built a collection that leaves little doubt as to her range and mastery as a storyteller. This book could be studied at the level of language alone as her sentences are both elegant and exacting. The people who inhabit these stories have been through some things and there are no easy answers, but let this book serve as a short course in self-acceptance, grit, honesty, and survival. I'm in awe of Whitehead's intelligence and heart, fully on display in these pages. I know she has many more books ahead of her. I can't wait to read every one of them." —Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works “Not all black holes are the size of suns or weigh as much as a galaxy” writes Tara Stillions Whitehead in the title story of her potent, hypnotic hybrid collection The Year of The Monster, “Some are small, microscopic, atomic-sized holes.” Freckle-sized black hole on the inner thigh, deleted scene, trauma, alienation, addiction, grief–such invisible centers of gravity litter the landscapes of these stories, drawing their narrators toward transgressions and obliterations, to which they are simultaneously attracted and repelled. But they, and we, are repelled even more forcefully by the casual brutality of Hollywood plotlines, American dreams, the casualties of apocalypse and empire. In language of glitter and grit, paralyzing twilights, and prismatic undertows, Stillions Whitehead resists resolution, expanding the narrative universe, defying both genre and gravity. What survives a black hole? The answer isn’t an end but an action: just turn the page and surrender to the irresistible pull of the next utterly absorbing story.” —Erin Rodini, And if the Woods Carry You “The Year of the Monster by Tara Stillions Whitehead is a must read! Stillions Whitehead writes with beautiful, razor-sharp language about the lingering darkness shadowed by the glitz of Hollywood. Whitehead takes us beyond the spotlights, the gossip, and the fandom to capture photographically and emotionally the people behind the scenes. In this vision of Los Angeles, we see the dreamers, the schemers, and the day workers who are fighting for their lives. The prose is fierce with each line an escalation, and an opportunity to see the world washed in sepia tones given a full-color blush on the big screen. Stillions Whitehead is a star, and this book shines brilliantly due to her ability to put the reader into odd, but meaningful moments of suspension as we're caught up in the lives of these unique characters. These stories will break you into pieces, and then soothe you back together. A Triumph.” —Tommy Dean, Hollows About Tara Stillions Whitehead Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and multi-genre writer living in Central Pennsylvania. Graduate of University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television Production and San Diego State University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, her writing and films work to subvert the toxic cultural narratives endorsed by popular media and the institutions that profit from stigmatizing and disadvantaging marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Her writing was included in the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for various awards, including Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. A former DGA assistant director for television, she is currently Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University, where she serves as production faculty for narrative filmmaking. Her hybrid chapbook/concept album, Blood Histories, was published by Galileo Press in 2021. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. The Year of the Monster is available on September 27, 2022 as a paperback (202 p.; 978-1-956692-33-4) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Tara Stillions Whitehead  PORTLAND, OR; September 20, 2022--“I Still Go to Bed with Water” sets its readers loose and untended, like the wild critters from a menagerie of collected memories. One day cooped up, the next fending for themselves in oddness. But oddness and strange intimacy is the resting temperature of this collection. Each poem is a type of pit stop – from childhood solitude to foreign corners and over to heartbreak – where we glimpse from the road what once was and how it becomes something entirely different in the rearview. Embracing humor and gratitude – and even Burt Lancaster – the language here is at turns cryptic, precise, sometimes German, and other times nodding to the flowers of the Romantics. “I Still Go to Bed with Water” is an ode to the resounding perfection of imperfect memory.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MELANIE SEVCENKO “Melanie Sevcenko is a luminous poet. Her work is deft and revealing, gorgeous with texture. I Still Go To Bed With Water is deeply moving, both tender and dark, soft as silk and jagged as broken glass.”--Victoria Gosling, author of Before the Ruins ABOUT MELANIE SEVCENKO Melanie Sevcenko is a poet, radio producer, and recovering bohemian. She moved to Portland, Oregon by way of Berlin, Germany, where she lived for almost a decade and hustled as a film critic and reporter for various outlets. Her poems have appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Verse Daily, Black Heart Magazine, apt, The Fourth River, and more. She is quite proud of the title of her poetry chapbook, We Slept in Body Bags, Just in Case, which was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. She’s also an Irish and Canadian citizen and is probably a distant relative of Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. These days, Melanie works in public radio and podcasting and has contributed to NPR, The Guardian, and Marketplace, amongst others. In her off-time, she can be found lighting bonfires in backyards or buried under her 16-pound orange tabby. ABOUT UNSOLICITED PRESS Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. I STILL GO TO BED WITH WATER is available on September 20, 2022 as a paperback (130 p.; 978-1-956692-32-7), e-book, and audiobook. Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram.  Anne Leigh Parrish is the author of ten previously published books including the moon won’t be dared, poetry; a winter night, a novel ; what nells dreams, a novella & stories; maggie’s ruse, a novel; the amendment, a novel; and by the wayside, stories. She lives in the South Sound Region of Washington State. ABOUT "AN OPEN DOOR" It's 1948 and the freedom granted women by the Second World War is gone. Edith Sloan, earning her doctorate, is told by her law student husband to cancel her academic plans. His bright future requires a certain kind of wife, one in the kitchen making dinner for important guests. Frustrated and defiant, Edith leaves him but returns when his begging letters become too much. Trapped by marriage and her husband's ambition, Edith struggles to find her footing and the means to her own survival. T.K. LEE is an award-winning member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, among others. In addition to poetry and drama, he has also crafted prize-winning short fiction and is core faculty in the nationally ranked MFA programs in Creative Writing as well as in Theatre Education, at the historic Mississippi University for Women, the nation’s first public academic institution for women, in Columbus, Mississippi. Scapegoat, by T.K. Lee, is his second collection of poetry, and in it, Lee continues deepening his artistic voice by centering the same unnamed narrator, introduced in his first collection, in more intimate and recognizable moments of vulnerability: Having Love and Having Loved. Far from what one might call love poetry, Lee effectively teases out the traditional tropes in this second collection, branching into experimental forms, at times. Yet, even in his playful and innovative approaches, he doesn’t allow his subject to grow maudlin or overly sentimental, The poems in Scapegoat thematically ebb and flow, catching and releasing the reader along with the narrator, as he struggles to learn the hardest truth of natural law: That to fully live, one must finally leave…whether that may mean a job, a home, or a marriage. Which he does, in each case, and fails, each time, and like the prodigal son, he gives in and returns to his childhood home, resigned at last to wait it out, until something becomes familiar again. But Fate is waiting for him there, to make sure he doesn’t miss the bigger lesson: That giving in is not the same as giving up. To join the event, head to our EVENTS page and select the reading. The link is in the description.
  Melanie Sevcenko is a poet, radio producer, and recovering bohemian. She moved to Portland, Oregon by way of Berlin, Germany, where she lived for almost a decade and hustled as a film critic and reporter for various outlets. Her poems have appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Verse Daily, Black Heart Magazine, apt, The Fourth River, and more. She is quite proud of the title of her poetry chapbook, We Slept in Body Bags, Just in Case, which was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. She’s also an Irish and Canadian citizen and is probably a distant relative of Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. These days, Melanie works in public radio and podcasting and contributes to NPR, The Guardian, and Marketplace, amongst others. In her off-time, she can be found cooking plant-based meals, lighting bonfires in backyards, or buried under her 16-pound orange tabby.  “I Still Go to Bed with Water” sets its readers loose and untended, like the wild critters from a menagerie of collected memories. One day cooped up, the next fending for themselves in oddness. But oddness and strange intimacy is the resting temperature of this collection. Each poem is a type of pit stop – from childhood solitude to foreign corners and over to heartbreak – where we glimpse from the road what once was and how it becomes something entirely different in the rearview. Embracing humor and gratitude – and even Burt Lancaster – the language here is at turns cryptic, precise, sometimes German, and other times nodding to the flowers of the Romantics. “I Still Go to Bed with Water” is an ode to the resounding perfection of imperfect memory.  Kayla Jeswald is a writer based in Youngstown, Ohio. She holds an master’s in Creative Writing from Youngstown State University, and currently teaches composition.  Stages of Blue is a nonfiction collection that deals with the harrowing effects of mental illness. Jeswald digs deep. Through poetry, short stories, and flash fiction, Jeswald opens a window so readers can witness the struggle of living with anxiety, bipolar disorder and severe depression. The collection is emotional and riveting. To join this free reading, head to our EVENTS page and find the date. Click the event to access the zoom link.
If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I would make Cesar Vallejos a tomatoes salad with basil leaves, feta cheese and kalamata olives. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? What scares me the most is not being able to finish what I started. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Jose Maria Arguedas, Aureliano Buendia and Juan Sover What books are on your nightstand? 1984 Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The quotes, because I don't have to take responsibility for what's in between What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Ulysses What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The notebook of my dead friend If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? reality is for those who lack imagination Does writing energize or exhaust you? both What are common traps for aspiring writers? desires What is your writing Kryptonite? imagination Have you ever gotten reader’s block? yes Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? hum, yes and no. Emotions don't have to be real What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Norman Solomon, Victor Wallis, Arnoldo García They are infallible, artisans of words and reasoning. I read most of their writings. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? the connections will appear later. I want the book to stand on its own. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I do not know that yet What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I think it has been buying a laptop and more books What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? when I was part of the resistance against the military dictatorship What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Todas las Sangres / All the Bloods As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A puma What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? honesty How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have more than three unpublished books and a few half-finished projects What does literary success look like to you? To be able to put out writings and books with my ideas, opinions, dreams and fantasies What’s the best way to market your books? A good and catchy summary, lots of book readings, and feedback from readers. What did you edit out of this book?” I have left out some stories that did not go with the theme of my experience in prison If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Journalism and/or teaching  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I vacillate between Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and Breece D’J Pancake. These men struggled. The latter, to his death. When pressed, Breece. Though, no meal. Think we’d just drink whiskey and ponder one's brokenness as a foundation for creativity. And though brokenness lives in everyone, the severity of particular individuals’ suffering can create diamonds from coal. Breece was a diamond. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Everything. I am a nurse who writes. Without formal training, workshops, or mentoring. I’d embrace those options if presented. I occupy two worlds, the writing and nursing world. It’s a complicated mental space. Though creativity is a hallmark of nursing. I’m fortunate to have a career, but the responsibilities of a career make balance difficult. Necessity can override passion. I’ve gained a new appreciation for writers, because we obsess over our work before a word ever lands on the paper and long after we hit send. Words can haunt. Lack of words can propagate madness. I teeter on the precipice of madness. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I’d swap crush for kindred spirit. Moth Smoke tells the story of Daru Shezad and follows his sharp decline. I believe we are one misstep, one firing, one infidelity, away from the circumstances that befell Daru. I have been Daru. My crush lay in the steamy darkness of the character and the sex, drugs, and societal shuffling that ensues. What books are on your nightstand? The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Order of Time (Rovelli), and A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (Berlin). Each unfinished. It pains me not to read every day. Several of my children are avid readers, which I embrace as a parent. The written word is a powerful learning tool. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Yikes. I am a grammatical disaster. But I love the comma. Wonderful for describing, listing and linking, but left unchecked can overtake a sentence. Though I lack confidence with the comma. When and where do I apply? It’s a struggle. Punctuation marks are akin to foreplay. Done well, they can be amazing. Too little, too much, and well… What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Every book assigned. I was a terrible student. I read for pleasure. My mother’s books and whatever was lying around the house. As a teen, I read the North and The South, by John Jakes, for fun. Who was I? But never remember reading an assigned book. Pure rebellion, because I love to read. Though if I did, I skimmed it. I have a faint memory of reading The White Mountains (The Tripod Trilogy) and The Boxcar Children. But human memory is untrustworthy and fallible, and I am old. So everything I said may be inaccurate. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My mirror. Shows me what I am. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Embrace the struggle. It's critical to the mastery of your existence. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Without question, both. No one reads anymore (exaggeration), and making a living as a writer is difficult. There are other ways to survive. Unless you're a writer, then a well-crafted sentence is akin to adrenaline. It’s essential to your survival, and its absence will bleed your soul. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Not developing your own voice. It’s something no one else has. Don’t mimic your favorite writer. Honor them with your interpretation of the world. Being too rigid. If you can’t set aside time to write, don’t worry. Write when you can. If you try to force your writing, you may struggle. The human mind is fickle and moody. Your job is to recognize your personal window. It’s not every day between noon and when your kids get home from school or whenever a blog on the rules of writers says it should be. It’s on your time. Cultivated from your emotions and experiences. What is your writing Kryptonite? Consciousness. A speck of dirt on the floor can distract, which sends me into a cleaning frenzy. And I’m not a cleaning fanatic, but opportunities not to write are abundant, taunting and self-protective. If you don’t write, you can’t submit. No submissions mean no rejections. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? If I allow myself or find the opportunity to read, never. Finding the time is like catching a high-speed train. Life never slows. I need to do better. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Hard to say. Empathy is essential to translate an individual's thoughts and feelings. Putting yourself in the characters’ place helps your writing resonate. Less empathy, less resonance. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? No literary friends. Please, don’t judge. I’m bearable. I have my professional relationships in the medical world, but not elsewhere. The writing community is amazing, vibrant and supportive. But online, there’s a shared misery. Proclamations put forth into the social sphere. Hardships, bemusing. The following and unfollows. The announced breaks from the platform. How many words did I write today? What editor screwed me? Do we cancel the unpopular, provocative or triggering? I just can’t. Do assholes write and publish? Yes. Assholes exist everywhere. Our literary shelves will be bare. Write or say something controversial and divisive. That’s okay. I can decide for myself something's value. Have you read the bible? After I read good writing, I want to become a better writer. It’s obvious I need a mentor. Having someone who has walked in your shoes. The tricky part is allowing that mentor into your life. The pairing needs to be organic and through the growth of my writing. Searching is counterproductive. Someone will enter my life. My doors open. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? Being a short story writer, I want each story to stand on its own. At baseline I’m erratic and just write. In my first collection, faint whiffs of a progression exist, though subtle. Even if I tried, I don’t think I could write with the underlying premise of forming connections. It makes me wonder, will others see a connection? Or gobbledygook. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I felt vulnerable. Someone may read my work. It made it more difficult. I’m a hack on borrowed time with tremendous self-imposed pressure. Half of my life has passed. Being published made me realize I have more to do. Yikes. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Thinkpad X1 Carbon. Best laptop keyboard, tactile response and key carry for a writer. [Mic drop] What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Herman Melville. Moby-Dick refuses to die. But who am I to judge? The book can be soul killing and a great American novel. I’ll try again to digest the endless whale facts. Though, I’m still contemplating. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? My father is smart and difficult. Once I scribbled words on scrap paper. He picked it up, read it. He said, “It’s good.” His words carried me for decades. Still carries me today. It’s the only praise I remember. That's power. A unique power from language. Dysfunctional. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? For me, The Stand from Mr. King. Though others will balk. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A fox. As an emergency room nurse, quick thinking and adaptability are key. Two attributes that serve my writing. And I work nights, Foxes are nocturnal. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Forgiveness. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? A half dozen unfinished stories on paper. In my head, endless. What does literary success look like to you? Is there such a thing? If it compromises my drive, I’ll pass. I have enough problems. What’s the best way to market your books? Write well. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I’ve done it once. Roach. A short on domestic violence with a twist. It’s my favorite story to date. I believe I captured something, though I’ll never capture the full emotional breadth and strength of a woman. Dare I try. I never thought about writing from the opposite sex until you mentioned it. Now I’m ruined. What did you edit out of this book? This book (Short-Story) collection was my unofficial writing course. Much needed to be edited out, I’m sure. I did my best to condense dialogue, flowery prose. On a podcast, I read a story from the collection after I submitted the final draft. In the future, I may record everything. When read out loud, as an author, you gain a different perspective. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Funny you should ask. The short answer. I have a day (night) job. Long answer. I tried the maladaptive ways to exist. They did not serve me well. To those in my inner circle, I was a storyteller. And several of those individuals told me I should write my experiences on paper. I am lucky; I have a career as a nurse, but writing was my genuine passion. An anchor for normalcy. When I can’t write, I become unhinged and self-destructive. I spent a lifetime as an emergency room nurse. During my struggles, I was trying to understand who I wanted to be. I am both a nurse and an author. Not writing isn’t an option.  Gloria Panzera is a writer and English teacher who resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and son. When she isn’t spouse-ing, mom-ing, teaching, grading, or watching Netflix she is writing. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Gloria earned her Master of Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University in Fiction Writing. You can find her on Twitter @gloriapanzera and Instagram @gloriapanzera.
Morgan was born and raised in rural Alabama and now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a software engineer. In her spare time, she enjoys writing and participating in activism. To sit in on the reading, you can pop over to our Events Calendar (https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/events.html), find the event and gain access to the Zoom information.  Unsolicited Press invites you to a literary reading with Liz Kellebrew and Cathy Shea.
Cathryn Shea's first full-length poetry book "Genealogy Lesson for the Laity," is available from Unsolicited Press of Portland, Oregon, release date September 29, 2020. Cathryn Shea’s poetry has been widely published and was nominated for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Cathryn's fourth chapbook, "Backpack Full of Leaves," was published by Cyberwit.net in 2019 and her third chapbook, "The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree" was published dancing girl press in 2019. Her second chapbook, "It's Raining Lullabies" is also from dancing girl press (November 2017). Cathryn's poetry has appeared recently in New Orleans Review (web feature), Typishly, After the Pause, burntdistrict, Permafrost, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, "Snap Bean," was released in 2014 by CC. Marimbo of Berkeley CA. Cathryn was a Best of the Net nominee in 2017 and she was a merit finalist for the Atlanta Review 2013 International Poetry Competition. In 2004, she received the Marjorie J. Wilson Award judged by Charles Simic. Cathryn is included in the 2012 anthology "Open to Interpretation: Intimate Landscape" and she has poems in 2017 anthologies, including "Luminous Echos" by Into The Void, and "The New English Verse" by Cyberwit.net (India). Follow her on Twitter: @cathy_shea. Liz Kellebrew writes poetry, short fiction, and essays from the Pacific Northwest. She wrote her debut poetry book, Water Signs (Unsolicited Press), while riding the ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. Her poems have appeared in public art installations and literary journals such as About Place, Room, and Writers Resist. She received The Miracle Monocle Award for Innovative Writing, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Calvino Prize. It also appears in various anthologies and journals, including The Conium Review, The Coachella Review, and Unreal Magazine. A member of the Academy of American Poets, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Learn more at lizkellebrew.com. To sit in on the reading, you can pop over to our Events Calendar (https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/events.html), find the event and gain access to the Zoom information.  PORTLAND, OR; September 6, 2022-- Scapegoat, by T.K. Lee, is his second collection of poetry, and in it, Lee continues deepening his artistic voice by centering the same unnamed narrator, introduced in his first collection, in more intimate and recognizable moments of vulnerability: Having Love and Having Loved. Far from what one might call love poetry, Lee effectively teases out the traditional tropes in this second collection, branching into experimental forms, at times. Yet, even in his playful and innovative approaches, he doesn’t allow his subject to grow maudlin or overly sentimental, The poems in Scapegoat thematically ebb and flow, catching and releasing the reader along with the narrator, as he struggles to learn the hardest truth of natural law: That to fully live, one must finally leave…whether that may mean a job, a home, or a marriage. Which he does, in each case, and fails, each time, and like the prodigal son, he gives in and returns to his childhood home, resigned at last to wait it out, until something becomes familiar again. But Fate is waiting for him there, to make sure he doesn’t miss the bigger lesson: That giving in is not the same as giving up.
About T.K. LEE T.K. LEE is an award-winning member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, among others. In addition to poetry and drama, he has also crafted prize-winning short fiction and is core faculty in the nationally ranked MFA programs in Creative Writing as well as in Theatre Education, at the historic Mississippi University for Women, the nation’s first public academic institution for women, in Columbus, Mississippi. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. Scapegoat is available on September 6, 2022 as a paperback (98p.; 978-1-956692-29-7) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: T.K. Lee  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Off the top of my head, Rainier Maria Rilke. He’s one of my favorite poets of all time, though I’m certainly aware of how strange this could get… maybe he’d offer advice to the tune of “Letters to a Young Poet”... but more likely I could practice my German and blow his mind with Impossible (fake meat) schnitzel. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Hanif Abdurraqib is certainly up there on my list. A poet, essayist and cultural critic, his latest book “A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance” took my breath away. It’s crushingly fervent, poignant, and essential. I think his prose is the closest anyone has ever gotten to conveying how it feels to live inside a movement or a song. What books are on your nightstand? I’ve got Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language,” TV writer Michael Schur’s book “How to Be Perfect,” which is basically a humorous and rudimentary guide to moral philosophy, and my e-reader is open to Joan Didion’s essay “Where the Kissing Never Stops” about Joan Biaz. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? From my memory I likely read all the books that were assigned, but I do remember skimming the whole way through “The Great Gatsby.” I felt it had little to do with what I was interested in or how I viewed life and the world around me at that time. And this line: “The more in tune with the times we were, the more we drank, and none of us contributed anything new” is brilliant, but I think is only found in that awful Baz Luhrmann remake. Go figure. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Office supplies of all kinds. Or maybe the wine section at the Grocery Outlet. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It certainly does both. Similar to exercise, there’s the initial dread and exhaustion, just coming to terms with starting the process. But once you get going, and drain the muck from the taps, it feels incredibly rewarding to create something, no matter the volume… then onto the fun stuff, like getting out of your head and being with people. What is your writing Kryptonite? True crime podcasts and streaming content. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I think I live in block form… and then only sometimes do I melt a little and the goods run off and onto the page. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I suppose my first trip to Europe, solo, as a 24-year-old. I farmed in the Pyrenees, connected with relatives I’d never met before in Ireland, and eventually found my home in Berlin. I’m still mining those experiences for my writing. What does literary success look like to you? Not having to work a day job; acquiring a large stone house somewhere on the Mediterranean and hosting a writing residency for people of all backgrounds; cooking together and sipping wine in the heat of summer nights; thinking, sketching, scribbling into the next day.  They thought they were going to Asia for two years. Asia beguiled them, and they never left. In 1957, Lily and Sid Norell and their teenagers Lauren and Jordy move from Washington to Taipei. Sid is an eager new Foreign Service Officer. Taipei then was impoverished and unpaved. Shocked at first, Lily is soon enchanted by the foreignness, moved by the poverty, amused by the eccentric whirl of diplomats and expats around her, and charmed by debonair Rocky Perreira. Also a U.S. diplomat, he seems to live freely like no one she has ever known. Lily makes unexpected new friends, discovers a passion in protecting orphans, and becomes a deft and acclaimed hostess. Thriving, she and Sid move on to Foreign Service postings in Saigon, then Bangkok and eventually Jakarta. Meanwhile Jordy grows up to be a Navy pilot, fighting in Vietnam. He participates in and is traumatized by the disastrous war-end evacuation of Saigon. Lauren too gets entangled with that war; it starts her career as a refugee worker. Decades later Lauren, reading letters Lily wrote during those first years in Taipei, fills in her mother's elisions. What was wrong with Jordy, so often in trouble? Were Rocky and Sid both CIA? And were Rocky and Lily lovers? Why did the family spin apart, and how did Lily herself make that happen? This is the story of a woman who confronts a challenging new situation and seizes the chance to powerfully reinvent herself—while her family slowly disintegrates. Advance Praise for "Lily Narcissus" "Lily Narcissus is at once intimate family portrait and panoramic world history that tracks the disastrous consequences of America's involvement in Asia in the second half of the 20th century. With precision and restraint, Lerner illuminates some essential mystery at the heart of other people and our understanding of them. It's beautiful, wise, lucid, and disarming. I was seduced, then devastated." -Andrew Palmer, author of The Bachelor  PHOTO CREDIT: FRANCO VOGT Jonathan Lerner, born in 1948, grew up in Washington, D.C., with the exception of two years in the late fifties when his father, a Foreign Service officer, was posted to Taipei. That experience, and the journeys there and back which took his family literally around the world, primed a lifelong addiction to travel. It was also the germ for his new novel LILY NARCISSUS. Lerner matriculated at Antioch College in 1965, but dropped out two years later and immersed himself in New Left activism, joining the staff of Students for a Democratic Society. His early writing experiences were producing SDS publications and contributing to other counterculture and "underground" newspapers. In 1969 he helped found the breakaway SDS faction the Weatherman. That became the clandestine and cult-like Weather Underground, which carried out a campaign of bombings. These experiences—and the challenges of being a young man struggling with his gay identity in a macho group culture—informed both Lerner's novel ALEX UNDERGROUND and his memoir SWORDS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN. "When I stopped trying to be a full-time revolutionary, in the mid-seventies, I embraced my calling to be a full-time writer," Lerner says. His first novel, CAUGHT IN A STILL PLACE, was published in 1989. Meanwhile he had begun establishing what became a successful career as a magazine writer and editor. Early on he wrote mostly travel stories, typically with a design or historic preservation angle. Later he concentrated on topics including architecture, urban planning, and issues of natural resources and sustainability. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Metropolis, The Architect's Newspaper and numerous other publications. He has been a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine for the last decade. During the eighties Lerner lived in various parts of Florida, and after that for 21 years in Atlanta. In 2011 he moved to New York's Hudson Valley, to live with Peter Frank, a philanthropist and community activist, whom he married in 2015. "Lily Narcissus" is available on October 20, 2022 as a paperback (196 p.; 978-1-956692-36-5), e-book, and audiobook. Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram.
 Photo by Dan Williamson If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I would cook fish tacos with homemade guacamole for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Writing doesn’t scare me. Not writing does. Short hiatuses, weeks or months, are okay. When I go longer periods without writing as a regular practice, that usually indicates something is out of balance. Sometimes, I fear I’ve lost the ability to focus on writing or get “in the zone” because I’m overworked or feeling mom guilt. I may be feeling that as I write this. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Since I’m already taking Kurt out to dinner, I’ll use this opportunity to discuss my love of Frankenstein’s creature. Could there be a more eloquent, tragic, and culturally misappropriated character in literature? What books are on your nightstand? Right now, there is a can of flat seltzer and a hair scrunchie on my nightstand. Across my room, on the dresser, I have (Unsolicited pressmate) Jackson Bliss’s Counterfactual Love Stories (Noemi Press), Maegan Poland’s What Makes You Think You’re Awake, James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff, and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Em dashes accomplish so much, but I enjoy the full-stop of a period. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Catcher in the Rye. I got ten pages in and thought, “This writing is so terrible, and this narrator was so whiny.” I think I read a few R.L. Stine books instead. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Coffee. As a sober person who spent many years using alcohol to get into a headspace to write, I appreciate the psychoactive support this beverage has provided me during many 4am writing sessions. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Read, read, read...but keep your eyes on your own paper. You can’t write if you spend too much time assessing others’ careers, which have no relation to yours. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Fakery. Going for effect. Forcing form without concern for content. Writing without considering the role of form. What is your writing Kryptonite? Exhaustion. And saying, “Yes.” As a full-time film production professor, filmmaker, mom, and friend, it is easy to overwork and let writing practices slip. I have to be selfish with my time and personal resources. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I am going through it right now! This is my first semester teaching all new preps, all while producing a short film, parenting, promoting the book I released in July, and preparing for a new year of projects. I love the books on my dresser, but they have taken me a long time to get through because I am so exhausted. COVID hasn’t helped. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I don’t know. Are there people who don’t feel emotions strongly? Maybe they can. I used to think that alcohol helped me feel my emotions and facilitate writing, but it actually numbed me to my real feelings. I still wrote a few decent things. Maybe someone can write without feeling emotions strongly, but how good can it be? What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m an extroverted introvert, so my idea of “friends” might be someone else’s idea of borderline friend/acquaintance. Throwing definitions to the wind here: I consider Barrett Warner, my editor for Blood Histories, a friend. Beyond his generous intelligence and discernment with my book, he and I have had a wonderful epistolary friendship that has kept me sane over the course of the pandemic. He has helped me balance restraint and wildness at the level of language. Katie Farris and Erin Rodini are supportive poet friends I adore and look to for inspiration and courage. Kate Bernheimer, Hannah Grieco, Tommy Dean, and Jo Varnish are editors I’ve worked with but would call friends. Christina Rosso-Schneider, a Philly-based writer who also owns A Novel Idea on Passynuk, has been a really wonderful writer to connect with in-person during the pandemic. She is incredibly supportive of local writers, and I was honored to read at her book launch recently. I’m grateful to the writing community I have on Twitter. They create a space for sharing work, opportunities, and promotion. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? That’s a good question. Blood Histories ended up being a concept album, and I do not see much connection to The Year of the Monster. That said, I would love for my body of work to have cohesion but also evolution. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? What’s interesting is that Unsolicited offered my first contract, but with the 33-month editorial schedule, I ended up publishing Blood Histories through Galileo Press in the interim. Working with Galileo helped me see how I wanted to trim the language in TYOTM. It also allowed me to see how gratifying the collaborative aspects of the publishing process can be. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? If you mean what was the best way I spent my hard-earned writing money, I would say the Yeti nano microphone I bought with some of the funds I earned from a paid reading with San Diego State University’s MFA program. The second-best would be other writers’ books. I love to support writers, to buy more books than I will ever have time to read. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I’m going to get flack for this, but it took me a while to enjoy Poe. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was nine years old, I wrote to the film magazine, Premiere. I sent them my photo and a short letter telling them that I was starring in the school play. I told them it was my dream to be on the cover of the magazine. They ended up publishing my letter in the Letters to the Editor section, alongside a photo mock-up with my picture and “PREMIERE” splashed across the top–a cover just for me. I realized that a letter, full of hope and passion, could find an audience. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Breakfast of Champions. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Staryu, from Pokemon. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? That’s hard to say. I think I use parts of a lot of people to fill in the mannerisms and desires and fears of my characters, but very few are intact fictionalizations. My Hollywood abusers are mostly intact, with very little alterations. I owe them nothing, but I wonder whether I will someday owe the industry their real names. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have one unpublished chapbook titled They More than Burned that was a top 20 finalist in Black Lawrence Press’s Chapbook Contest this fall and received an honorable mention in The Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2021 Chapbook Contest. I also have a novel, The Law of Inversion, about a failed end-of-times prophecy, a runaway Nobel scientist, and a math teacher harboring many secrets. What does literary success look like to you? Reading my book from start to finish and feeling like I did what I wanted to do. And maybe getting a blurb from Jason Isbell. What’s the best way to market your books? Twitter has been a really handy platform, at least for my first book. We went into the second printing before release day, and most of that was due to Twitter promotion. Local venues are also really important. I plan to have my launch for this book at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, which is not only a beautiful space, but also a huge literary venue that has hosted a lot of great readings and book releases. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Remembering that many men are more indirect in their speech and talk a lot less than I imagine they do. What did you edit out of this book? I pulled a reimagined fairy tale titled “Blood Histories”...which ended up becoming the title work of my chapbook from Galileo. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? When I’m not writing, I am teaching film production at a small private university. If I could choose what I would do? Honestly, I’m doing it. But my next choice would be forensic pathology. I really love forensic science and enjoy reading about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and multi-genre writer living in Central Pennsylvania. Graduate of University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television Production and San Diego State University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, her writing and films work to subvert the toxic cultural narratives endorsed by popular media and the institutions that profit from stigmatizing and disadvantaging marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Her writing was included in the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for various awards, including Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. A former DGA assistant director for television, she is currently Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University, where she serves as production faculty for narrative filmmaking. Her hybrid chapbook/concept album, Blood Histories, was published by Galileo Press in 2021.  The Year of the Monster explores American culture as commodity and comorbidity. From black holes and animal extinctions to death row trauma porn and the redacted scripts of Hollywood abuses: these sixteen stories subvert traditional notions of justice, challenge vulnerable characters to survive in transgressive spaces. Mixing traditional prose with screenplay and script-hybrid, and certainly not without hope, The Year of the Monster encourages close examination of how American media and our complicity in its marriage of violence and culture perpetuate the human and environmental crises.
 PORTLAND, OR; August 30, 2022--A memoir in verse, Elisabeth Blair’s because God loves the wasp documents two and a half years she spent living in two abusive facilities for “troubled teens” during the late 1990s. The wilderness camp and emotional growth boarding school were modeled on the teachings and tenets of Synanon, a mid-20th-century cult.
Alternating between painful clarity and surreal metaphor, the poems grapple with the shock and disorientation of being taken away in the middle of the night by strangers; the bewilderment of navigating expectations in an environment of institutionalized bullying, shunning, and sleep deprivation; and the gravity of the adulthood that follows. Writing in the second person, Blair confronts the reader, withholding the potential relief of distance. Ripping through a patchwork of disturbing descriptions—of violent staff, isolated and terrified children, and decades of brutal nightmares—she cradles her fierce testimony in sonorous language and striking imagery. The book’s tight corralling of traumas takes aim at the notion that inducing fear, despair, and shipwrecked helplessness can rehabilitate a child—the catastrophic doctrine of “tough love.” Praise for Elisabeth Blair Elisabeth Blair writes as a survivor of a sadistic and dehumanizing facility for “troubled teens”—or perhaps the word is “camp.” It certainly reminds us of the other, more famous camps, gulags, and re-education centers we’re aware of. Because Blair is also a brilliant poet, she can take us into the perceptions of the shattered person or, in this case, child. The child understands only the contours of coercion: “the storm wants specific things.” In fact, she no longer identifies as human, and, at times, that seems like a good thing: “You tell them you’re a slice of grass where a shadow falls—/your greens seem burnt/but they’re not.//They don’t believe you.” Blair’s language is barbed, destabilizing, and very much alive. This is an important book. -- RAE ARMANTROUT About Elisabeth Blair Elisabeth Blair is a Montréal-based poet and editor with an extensive background in music and visual art. She has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Wildacres, and ACRE. Her publications include two chapbooks--We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press, 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, and Juked. This is her first book. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and instagram. because God loves the wasp is available on August 30, 2022 as a paperback (78 p.; 978-1-956692-28-0) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Elisabeth Blair Powerhouse Memoirist Andy Smart’s THE MORE YOU HATE, a Memoir-in-Essay Collection is Now Available8/16/2022
 PORTLAND, OR; August 16, 2022--THE MORE YOU HATE ME by Andy Smart is a memoir-in-essays collection that examines the author’s experience with his father’s suicide and the layered influence of the film Full Metal Jacket on both men. As Smart navigates the worlds of his past, present, and future, Kubrick's Vietnam war movie casts its long shadow over him; his is a story of what it means to live each day as a sequel to the last. This isn’t just a suicide memoir or a survivor’s victory lap, but a book about the hardest truths of being a son.
PRAISE FOR ANDY SMART “Family violence is the subject of many memoirs but I’ve not seen a book examine the nuance and indeterminacy of gun culture as it slips between the walls of the house next door. Smart’s narrative unfolds against the back drops of Hollywood and the NRA—America’s twin churches—where death is advertised in bright colors. At home the darkness streams down. This is a must read. I’ll wager you can’t put it down.” —Stephen Kuusisto author of Planet of the Blind About Andy Smart Andy Smart earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Lasell University, where he was a Michael Steinberg Fellow. Andy’s essays have appeared in Salamander, Sleet Magazine, and Moon City Review as well the anthologies Show Me All Your Scars (In Fact Books) and Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time (Kelson Books). His poetry has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Andy was a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. His first chapbook of hybrid poetry, Blue Horse Suite, is available from Kattywompus Press. This is his first book. Andy lives in Missouri and online at www.AndySmartWrites.com. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp The More You Hate Me is available on August 16, 2022 as a paperback (244 p.; 978-1-956692-27-3) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Andy Smart  Elisabeth Blair is a Montréal-based poet and editor with an extensive background in music and visual art. She has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Wildacres, and ACRE. Her publications include two chapbooks--We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press, 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, and Juked. Unsolicited Press has the privilege of publishing her first full-length collection, because God loves the wasp. Before you preorder a copy of her book, take a minute to get to know about her process and thoughts on writing. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em dash, for sure—it’s gorgeous, breathless, adaptive, helpful, noncommittal, suggestive… What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The super comfy soft chairs at the University of Vermont library, which was near where I lived when I was working on much of this book. They are boxy and plush and you can curl up in them while swinging the attached little arm-desk around in front of you for a laptop or notebook. I wish I had one at home! Does writing energize or exhaust you? Each type of writing has different effects on me. I get super energized writing about poetry – like when I’m drafting my poetry craft newsletter, or offering a poet feedback on their poem or manuscript. Freewriting of any sort is deeply calming. Writing about trauma carries with it a special kind of deep focus, catharsis, and relief (though it brings with it a whole host of other emotions too). When writing fiction (whether in prose or verse form) I find it’s so challenging on so many levels that I get exhausted after only a few hours. It was only this year that I finally learned how to take cat naps, which help keep me going when I’m working on fiction-based projects. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes! In the past I went through very long, 2-year-ish cycles, where I was either reading a lot or reading very little. I always thought about it as a consuming mindset vs. a producing mindset. Ideally you want to have both, but in practice, if I was in a production phase, I could only read a few pages of a book before I’d start wiggling in my seat like an impatient child and then leap away to write—I just had too many ideas. Whereas in the consumption phase, I was open, calmer, and had more room for new words, new ideas. Over the last 5 years I’ve been able to balance this cycle out through teaching. To prepare for giving a workshop, I need to read all sorts of wonderful stuff, so I’m always regularly reading—especially poetry. And I’m so glad — it’s such a great side effect of teaching. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I think anyone who wants to be a writer can be a writer. There’s room for every one of us weirdos. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? At around age 10, I discovered quite by accident the absolutely ghastly murder-suicide poem “In the Round Tower at Jhansi” by Christina Rossetti. Until then I’d only read childrens’ poetry (simpering or humorous stuff) and never really took to it—but this poem gave me shivers to my bones! I’d often re-read it in secret, scaring myself silly. Then at age 13, I had to make a poetry anthology for class. To find poems, I wandered through the public library opening books at random, and happened upon “A Lovely Love” by Gwendolyn Brooks. At that time in my life I was experiencing the intensity of first love, and I was astonished at how this strange, musical writing deftly portrayed wild, passionate, secret (!) love. Both these experiences profoundly affected me. No movie I had ever seen—despite all the money and resources in Hollywood—had affected me like these tiny poems had. It was clear to me that poems wielded enormous power. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I’m working on three main manuscripts right now—a giant erasure poem, a novel in verse, and a sci-fi novel. Then there are 3-4 other bits and bobs that might assemble themselves into a manuscript in the future, but which are currently just poking around on the sidelines. What does literary success look like to you? Literary success takes two forms. The first is supporting myself financially with my writing and writing-related activities. This is pretty easy to measure (if near-impossible to achieve). The other is more difficult to measure: I would like to earn the respect of those whom I respect—to become a valued peer in the eyes of my literary idols. What did you edit out of this book? The early drafts had a lot of teenager-y sarcasm, bite, and bitterness to them. I had to first let my 16-year-old self have her say—exactly the way she wanted to say it—before I could gently guide those snipes and rages into more sophisticated poetic expressions of these same emotions. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? If I wasn’t creative, I think I’d love to be an entomologist. Bugs are the best!  A memoir in verse, Elisabeth Blair’s because God loves the wasp documents two and a half years she spent living in two abusive facilities for “troubled teens” during the late 1990s. The wilderness camp and emotional growth boarding school were modeled on the teachings and tenets of Synanon, a mid-20th-century cult.
ORDER TODAY.  PORTLAND, OR; August 9, 2022— Dark Roux is the story of a family simmering on the verge of burning to ruin. The delicate nature of this sauce depicts how Cajun culture survives Americanization along parade routes and swamps in South Louisiana. The Mouton family approaches Mardi Gras 1999 expecting traditional joy and release. But teenage struggles with sexual orientation and independence, the ambiguity of young love complicated by the racism of the South, motherhood leaving little room to love one’s self (even when two non-family women are waiting to help), and blind ambition as a way to deal with the past, all plague the family. The lines tying them together become taut, threatening to fail and toss them into the hurricane of the future.
There is a green oak they all stay moored to. Auguste Chenevert buoys the family with unconditional love and moonshine, holding their bonds with sturdy hands and a sturdier heart, as their two hundred forty-four year old culture comes ashore to a complicated modern world. Each family member shares their experience of Cajun culture, and Auguste, through four separate points of view. Their lives cross like untethered boats on a tiny crawfish pond. Only one thing could bring them all together to decide how each will each carry their culture, and their family, into the 21st century: the death of Auguste Chenevert. About Toby LeBlanc Toby LeBlanc is a mental health therapist in Austin, TX. Writing is a way his own tales can have life alongside the countless stories of courage and strength of his clients. While he and his family sleep under the Texas stars, he will always say he's from Louisiana. He enjoys wearing period-specific pirate costumes and fishing. His dream is to one day do both at the same time. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. DARK ROUX is available on August 9, 2022 as a paperback (326 p.; 978-1-956692-26-6) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Toby LeBlanc 夢ポップ折り紙 Dream Pop Origami: A Permutational Memoir About Hapa Identity is Imaginative and a Powerful Essay Collection About Being True to Oneself  PORTLAND, OR; July 26, 2022-- Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice.
ADVANCE PRAISE “Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world.” —Regina King, Emmy-award-winning actress & director “Jackson Bliss seems to have dispatched Dream Pop Origami from a future where technically adventurous nonfiction blends so perfectly with vulnerable self-discovery that it’s impossible to imagine the two functioning without each other. By intricately folding his experiences into delicate hybrid forms, Bliss has made a memoir about how to nurture the different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, essential.” —John D’Agata, author of A New History of an Essay "Jackson Bliss has written a book I dreamed about my whole life. From the moment I got obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventures as a young child to my obsession with Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in college, I always wanted a larger canon of alternate reality storytelling. Jackson not only delivers this but also gives the device the occasion of a moving memoir about identity. Dream Pop Origami is not just a book—it's a whole immersive creative experience and the good news is once you put it down you can dare yourself another go through its seemingly endless labyrinths. The more attempts I made, the more I understood why this fragmented self-portrait required the rearranging of so many mosaic tiles. Throughout it all, Jackson's story of what it means to be hapa in our world is not lost—this book is not a compromise of style and substance but a triumph of their collaboration into something definitely brilliant." —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity “The crackling sound you hear is me feverishly and compulsively turning the pages of Jackson Bliss’ utterly original, genre defying riff on autobiography, memory, language and detail. It might also be Bliss himself, verbally folding and unfolding his story the way one shapes and reshapes a single piece of origami paper into any animal or object. I’m equally sure this is a magic book and that the spells all work. From an exploration of video games to Tibetan higher planes, Bliss expresses the varied ways in which the second sight of his hapa artist self animates the landscape, while taking readers on a journey through unabashed emotion, memory and a life lived with intensity and great feeling. This book is incredible.” —Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of American Harvest “Bliss masterfully captures the kaleidoscopic gymnastics of his multicultural (hapa) identity, inviting the reader into humorous, heartbreaking, and insightful moments strung along a choose your own adventure. Punctuated with quizzes, lists, and charts, Dream Pop Origami seems to invoke the innovations of Ben Marcus and Karen Tei Yamashita, but these deep dives into self, race, and pop culture are a 100% Bliss.” —Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark and Where We Go When All We Were is Gone “Take a life and fold it in half then fold that half into another half; keep going until there is nothing left. Make it into something beautiful, dreamed, imagined; it can be any vision you want, that is, until it's time to take it apart, to examine just how such a self was constructed. You'll never be the same dreamer again. Jackson Bliss nonetheless exposes the creases, the wearing away of self and soul, the deterioration of appearances and the texture of the fragile nature of the idealized self against the reality into which we are constructed. Do you want to do this? he seems to ask, allowing us to spy or avert our eyes. If life is an adventure, what does it mean when you have to unfold, uncrease, unravel, destroy your life in order to live it? With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek. It is only through undoing, revisiting, and shredding our scraps that lead one to oneself. Dream Pop Origami is a beautifully made star. See for yourself.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt & Between: Essays on the Writing Life and The Body: An Essay “Empty of permanence and interlinked with infinite beings in a net of belonging, Jackson Bliss imagines the world of in-between places. In Dream Pop Origami, ceaseless migrations and reincarnations actualize playful transformation tales just like the samadhi of freedom folds across any and all barriers. A memoir of renga-like linked verse, a song of becoming and love.” —Duncan Ryuken Williams, author of American Sutra and Hapa Japan “By turns sly, sorrowful, pensive, and forthright, Dream Pop Origami makes us rethink the possibilities of nonfiction writing, and of how we name and shape our identities.” —Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner “At the risk of sounding trite, this book is just so much fun! But, like, for real—fun is just a diversion tactic for Dream Pop Origami’s honest profundity and Jackson Bliss’s expert storytelling. Each adventure is delivered in its most perfect form, ready for your interactive pleasure: To feel the complicated pleasure of nostalgia, go to chapter 22. To feel the adolescent pleasure of a game, go to chapter 28. To feel the naughty pleasure of reading Jackson Bliss’s prose, go to chapter 35. To fulfill satisfaction, read this book.” —Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary ABOUT JACKON BLISS Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss. ABOUT UNSOLICITED PRESS Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. DREAM POP ORIGAMI is available on July 26, 2022 as a paperback (312 p.; 978-1-956692-74-7), e-book, and audiobook. An interactive website is also available (dreampoporigami.com). Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram.  This Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 6:30PM, two great authors, Jackson Bliss and Frances Badalamenti will be conversing at the illustrious Rose City Book Pub in NE Portland. If you are unable to join, we will be livestreaming the event via Jackson's IG account, @jacksonbliss. Jackson Bliss and Frances Badalamenti will be sitting down with each to talk writing as well as the release of DREAM POP ORIGAMI. Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice. Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss. Frances Badalamenti was raised in Queens, New York and Suburban New Jersey, but she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. Her essays, stories and interviews appear in The Believer Magazine, Longreads, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Entropy and elsewhere. Salad Days (2021) is her second novel; her debut novel I Don't Blame You released in 2019  PORTLAND, OR; July 19, 2022-- Unsolicited Press is proud to be bring you another exceptional poetry collection, LOWERCASE GOD, by Mark Fleckenstein. Fleckenstein's pen is not a sword, but a paintbrush, skillfully painting poetic gems on every page. LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF MY DAYS AS AN IDEALIST You urge me, after so many years of silence, to send you details about my occupations, about this "wonderful" world in which, you say, I am lucky enough to live and move and have my being. I might answer that I am a man without occupation, and that this world is not in the least wonderful. —E.M. Cioran, “Letter To A Faraway Friend” How far I have come to wish to come home. This morning, the first in twenty-three exiled years, the white noise of commerce eclipsed my only dream of childhood: the dull boots and swollen faces of bodies hang- ing from streetlamps. Your letters and wishes for my life here arrive whitened by a belief in this country like a trinket of light perfect and invisible. What has not changed and what has are identical. 28 years earlier, Chinese tanks and soldiers rolled over students. Here whole families sleep on sewer grates and barter for whatever one might spare. Yesterday, a pigeon appeared on my desk and pecked at your letters. My cat caught it in mid-flight. The argument of its wings surprised him into letting it go. About Mark Fleckenstein
Mark Fleckenstein was born in Chicago, and grew up in Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, and presently lives in Massachusetts. He graduated from University of North Carolina in Charlotte with a B.A. in English, Vermont College of Fine Arts and received an MFA in Writing. He became very involved in the poetry community in and around Boston, for over 30 years. He was an assistant editor for (BLuR), the Boston Literary Review, founder/coordinator of two bi-weekly poetry reading series in Boston and a workshop leader, He’s given poetry readings with famous poets (Charles Simic, Linda Gregg, Mark Doty, Mark Cox and Carl Phillips) and not so famous poets. He is also a painter. He has two amazing daughters and a large, eccentric, long-haired black cat named Ariadne. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press was founded in 2012 and is based in Portland, OR. The press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Learn more at www.unsolicitedpress.com. The publisher can be followed on Instagram and Twitter: @unsolicitedp LOWERCASE GOD is available on July 19, 2022 as a paperback (64p.; 978-1-956692-24-2) and e-book (all major retailers). The title is distributed to the trade by Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts:  PORTLAND, OR; July 19, 2022-- FRUITCAKE is a collection of poems that follows a persona through various jobs as an Administrative Judge and civil servant, the adoption of her son and her relationship through the years with her parents and in particular, her father, who worked as a macaroon baker.
While the subject matter varies throughout the collection, the thread of the narrative voice is wry, humorous and sharp. About Lisa Badner Lisa Badner Lisa Badner is the author of the forthcoming book of poems, FRUITCAKE. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, Mudlark, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, the Mom Egg Review, Ping Pong, New World Writing, Mohave River Review, #TheSideshow and others. She received a Pushcart (2018) Special Mention. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Brooklyn Law School and coordinates the tutorial program at the Writers Studio. She lives in Brooklyn with her teenager and her chihuahua. About Unsolicited Press Unsolicited Press strives to produce exceptional works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from award-winning authors. Unsolicited Press based out of Portland, Oregon and focuses on the works of the unsung and underrepresented. As a womxn-owned, all-volunteer small publisher that doesn’t worry about profits as much as championing exceptional literature, we have the privilege of partnering with authors skirting the fringes of the lit world. We’ve worked with emerging and award-winning authors such as Shann Ray, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Brook Bhagat, Kris Amos, and John W. Bateman. Learn more at unsolicitedpress.com. Find us on twitter and Instagram, @unsolicitedp. FRUITCAKE is available on July 19, 2022 as a paperback (74 p.; 978-1-956692-23-5) and e-book (all major retailers). Retailers, schools, and libraries can order copies through Ingram. The author is open to speaking with the media, holding readings, and engaging in other author opportunities. ### Press only, Unsolicited Press 619.354.8005 marketing@unsolicitedpress.com For artist interviews, readings, and podcasts: Lisa Badner   Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino was a 2014 Emerging Writer's Fellow at the Center for Fiction in New York City. He graduated with honors in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. He has had work published in Liars' League New York, Akashic - Mondays are Murder, Gargoyle Magazine, Joyland, Slow Trains and Plain Spoke. His chapbook Alphabetica: The Other Side of Love was published by Corgi Snorkel Press.  The stories in The Guide to Being a Dictator’s Mistress are meant to capture a reader’s imagination and take the familiar, and unfamiliar, and provide for an enjoyable reading experience. In the title story and the companion story The Guide to Being a Dictator’s Body Double, characters who are caught in the orbit of those ruling with an iron fist have to find ways to survive. In In Character, a man finds himself in trouble after trying to translate the Batman we all know from the comic books and the movies to real life. And in the last story Alphabetica: The Other Side of Love, the slow disintegration of a marriage is laid bare as a couple comes to the realization that getting married was the easy part. As a range of normal, and somewhat normal, characters navigate familiar worlds, often with a slight twist, the stories aim to engage the full range of human emotion in a thought provoking, and unique, fashion. Grab a copy today.  Lisa Badner is the author of the forthcoming book of poems, FRUITCAKE. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, Mudlark, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, the Mom Egg Review, Ping Pong, New World Writing, Mohave River Review, #TheSideshow and others. She received a Pushcart (2018) Special Mention. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Brooklyn Law School and coordinates the tutorial program at the Writers Studio. She lives in Brooklyn with her teenager and her chihuahua.  FRUITCAKE is a collection of poems that follows a persona through various jobs as an Administrative Judge and civil servant, the adoption of her son and her relationship through the years with her parents and in particular, her father, who worked as a macaroon baker. While the subject matter varies throughout the collection, the thread of the narrative voice is wry, humorous and sharp. Grab your copy here. The event is free and you can join by heading over to our EVENTS calendar. Click on the ready to find the Zoom link.
 Over the past year, we've worked with countless skilled and professional narrators to get out backlist, frontlist, and future books turned into audiobooks. We want readers of all ages/stages/abilities to have the opportunity to devour our books. To celebrate the launch of many of our books through Audible, we would like to offer a 30-Day free trial of Audible Premium or Audible Plus Premium. When you sign up, you can listen to up to two free books during the trial. Honestly, there's no better way to get into our books that not having to pay a dime. And if you love what we have to offer, you can stay subscribed and listen to all our books. We're releasing new books every month. Simply click this LINK and sign up to start listening. |
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