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America’s Future
Edited by Caroline Bock Jona Colson
AMERICA'S FUTURE features 164 bold, thought-provoking writers. Some pieces turn to our past, reckoning with the wounds we still carry in today’s scars before questioning the future. Others turn their gaze forward, imagining the ways hope and reinvention can carve new paths. Learn more…
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Capital Queer
Edited by Jona Colson Caroline Bock
Capital Queer: A Pride Celebration from Washington Writers' Publishing House 32 bold LGBTQIA+ voices from across the DMV. Learn more…
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You Cannot Save Here
by Tonee Mae Moll
A collection of poems about how we live when each day feels like the world is ending. The poems ask what we do with the small moments that matter when so much around us-climate disaster, gun violence, pandemics, wars-makes these days feel apocalyptic. Learn more…
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The Machine Autocorrects Code to I
by Chanlee Luu
In an experiment of forms, this universe of poems wanders thruogh the messy past, battles in the charged present, and dreams/nightmares to the unknown future. This collection intertwines racial/cultural identity with gender, politics, and the environment, while also traversing time and place. Learn more…
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For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus
by Varun Gauri
An intimate, funny, heartbreaking novel about the immigrant community and the plolitics of marriage in small-town America Learn more…
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Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir
by Megan Doney
A memoir of a teacher's perspective on the current experience of American students, written as a personal response to a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia. A must-read for educators at all levels, for college students, for parents, and for all of us who think deeply and widely about American society. Learn more…
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Aquas/Waters
by Miguel Avero
Aguas/Waters introduces the rich and vibrant imagery of Uruguayan poet Miguel Avero to the English-speaking world through Jona Colson's translation. Selected works from two of his early collections highlight the legacy of magical realism and rioplatense rhythms in this prolific poet's fierce style. Learn more…
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Transplant: A Memoir
by Bernardine Watson
A page-turning, personal journey into one Black woman's battle with kidney disease and the American medical system. Bernardine Watson's book is at once a truth-telling and an affirmation of the life force propelling us all toward love and hope. Learn more…
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Bad Questions
by Len Kruger
Humorous and heartbreaking, Bad Questions is a coming-of-age journey toward redemption and self-awareness, skirting the lines between spirituality, skepticism, and faith-and asking the big questions Learn more…
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Leda’s Daughters
by K. Avvirin Berlin
In this debut collection, the lives of working women are spun by able hands into myth. These are salt-of-the-earth poems that traverse and transgress the temporal, re-envisioning African American and Native American women's history as a history of poetics. Learn more…
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The Witch Bottle and Other Stories
by Suzanne Feldman
From Depression era Mississippi to the suburbs of modern America, to the trials and tribulations of smart young women struggling to make a name for themselves in the arts, Feldman delves deep into the dreams and emotions of regular people and makes them beautiful and accessible. This prize-winning collection of short stories and two novellas, offers entrancing tales of redemption, betrayal, tradition, and rebellion. Learn more…
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Why I Cannot Take a Lover
by Grace Cavalieri
A new edition of 1970 poetry collection by Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri who was also a founder of Washington... Learn more…
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Altamira
by Myra Sklarew
A new edition of poetry by American University Emeritus Professor Myra Sklarew, focusing on her love of science and natural... Learn more…
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And Silent Left the Place
by Elizabeth Bruce
A silent old man climbs into his secret hole, burdened by his Great War bargain--his voice for life with his beloved. The debut novel of Texas native Elizabeth Bruce is a lyric tale of violence, redemption, and love reclaimed through the cruel dry land of Texas. Learn more…
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Working Vocabulary
by Sid Gold
The range of this collection is immense; from narrative and portrait to introspective lyric, these poems feel as relevant today as they did at the time of their original publication. Gold's voice, full of the subtle wit and wry humor of the streets, makes readers feel as if someone is just pulling up a barstool and saying over a tall cold one, let me tell you a story Learn more…
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This is What America Looks Like
Edited by Caroline Bock Jona Colson
An anthology of new fiction and poetry from Washington Writers' Publishing House, a 47-year-old cooperative, all-volunteer press based in the... Learn more…
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The Rest of the World
by Adam Schwartz
A refreshing story of a writer whose ear is so pitch-perfectly trained to his characters it seems as if he's an angel eavesdropping from their rooftops. His cast heralds from every walk of life, from street corners and housing projects from dive bars and fishing boats we might otherwise drown out with the noise of our lives, and he listens to them with a gigantic heart Learn more…
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The Understudy’s Handbook
by Steven Leyva
Drawing heat and music (and luscious food) from a New Orleans and Houston childhood, Steven Leyva's poetry reveals a sensibility forged by a growing awareness of race and class: child's joy and bafflement, a black Baltimore father's worry. Learn more…
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Hurry Up and Relax
by Nathan W. Leslie
Nathan Leslie portrays self-appointed cops, shoplifting teens, gym rats, prayformers, polyamorous gamers, Bob-obsessed friend-collectors, hug phobics, online stalkers, dinosaur erotica writing gurus, and self-medicating placenta eaters. Learn more…
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Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak
by Elizabeth Knapp
In Knapp's second collection, celebrities come and go, while the collection's patron saint, Emily Dickinson, presides over all. At its heart, this book is about loss and its endless reverberations, while at the same time, it embraces the notion of art as a kind of immortality. Learn more…
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Said Through Glass
by Jona Colson
Jona Colson's debut poetry collection asks the reader to reconsider ordinary life as something curious, even fantastic. A poet of... Learn more…
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Carry Her Home
by Caroline Bock
Forty-seven stories about family-from flash fiction to full-length works, deeply felt, autobiographical fiction-unfold across the decades from the 1960s to... Learn more…
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How to Prove a Theory
by Nicole Tong
In this brave, elegiac debut, Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet's hometown after a water contamination event. Learn more…
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Strivers and Other Stories
by Robert Williams
Strivers and Other Stories explores a range of African-American and Southern voices reflecting characters striving towards their versions of the American dream. In 15 stories, we meet teachers and doctors, train porters and factory workers, soldiers and musicians; mothers, fathers, children and spouses; mentors and mentees. Learn more…
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St. Bart’s Way
by Patricia Schultheis
At. Bart's Way is a fictional street developed after the First World War when streetcar lines were extended to Baltimore's leafy outer reaches. Some of these stories transpire in a single day; others, over several decades, but, in each, characters weigh the outcome of their choices against the false promise of permanence and stability suggested by the stolid homes of St. Bart's Way. Learn more…
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Hearsay
by Christopher Ankney
Explores the mysterious death of the speaker's father, whether it was murder, suicide, or accident. These elegies focus more on the impact death has on the living kin, especially a child deciphering manhood with no guide, seeking redemption and faith in the midst of great tragedy. Learn more…
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Rush of Shadows
by Catherine Bell
RUSH OF SHADOWS is an epic of greed and violence set in the American West of the 1850's and 1860's. Learn more…
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Aliens & Other Stories
by Kathleen Wheaton
Political refugees from Argentina's "dirty war," survivors of a Cuban shipwreck and of Franco's Spain all navigate life as foreigners, whether in Madrid, Buenos Aires or suburban Washington, D.C. With wry, nuanced compassion, Wheaton follows these resilient people as they reconcile the absurdities of contemporary life with a legacy of dislocation, loss and longing. Learn more…
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Loose Weather
by Robert Herschbach
Loose Weather, interweaves empirical observation with history, politics and myth. The resulting poems are lyrical yet ambitious in scope, searching out the root existential questions underlying our engagement with this world. Learn more…
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Into the Wilderness
by David Ebenbach
This collection explores the theme of parenthood from many angles: an eager-to-connect divorced father takes his kids to a Jewish-themed baseball game; a lesbian couple tries to decide whether their toddler son needs a man in his life; one young couple debates the idea of parenthood while another struggles with infertility; a reserved father uses an all-you-can-eat buffet to comfort his heartbroken son. Learn more…
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The Color of My Soul
by Melanie Hatter
Kira Franklin, a black newspaper reporter in Southwest Virginia in 1993, begins to question her own culture when she pursues a story on a local Cherokee community raising money to reclaim ancestral lands. The history she knows about her own family - that her father fought and died in Vietnam - gets turned on its head when her mother announces that her father is not only alive and has come back to see her, but that he is white. Learn more…
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Words We Might One Day Say
by Holly Karapetkova
The poems in this volume explore the experiences of love and loss; of motherhood and childhood; and of living between... Learn more…
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Success: Stories
Edited by David Taylor
David A. Taylor's collection, Success: Stories, is the 2008 Fiction Award winner from Washington Writers' Publishing House. His work has... Learn more…
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Provenance
by Brandel France De Bravo
Taking her cue from Ralph Walso Emerson who said, "Every word was once a poem," she has written 26 poems--one for every letter--inspired by etymologies. By braiding autobiography with the biographies of "Apricot," and "Zygote" and everything inbetween, the poet tells a story that transports us to places both familiar and far-away. Learn more…