More of This World or Maybe Another by Barb Johnson
“More of This World or Maybe Another is a collection of award-winning short fiction about four outsiders whose unruly lives intersect on the back streets of New Orleans from writer Barb Johnson. Funny and haunting by turns, Johnson’s unforgettable characters are driven by something fragile and irresistible, a sputtering drive to love and be loved, in these “stunning stories . . . the kind that reveal, enlarge, and make living...
i built a boat with all the towels in your closet, by Leia Penina Wilson
i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown), winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: Evie Shockley Buy this Book Leia Penina Wilson’s i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) is at once a love ballad and a warning. These poems are—at their simplest—about relationships, sex, love, creatures, different kinds (and degrees) of violence, and—at their...
Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Throughout her blockbuster career, Jodi Picoult has seamlessly blended nuanced characters, riveting plots, and rich prose, brilliantly creating stories that “not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us” (The Boston Globe). Now, in her highly anticipated new novel, she has delivered her most affecting work yet—a book unlike anything she’s written before. For more than a decade, Jenna...
November Butterfly by Tania Pryputniewicz
Alternately image rich and direct, the narrative lyric poems in November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press) channel the voices of iconic women, from Nefertiti to Guinevere to Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath. The collection explores women’s choices and their consequences, as well as the violences that are not chosen. It delineates the collective responsibility, male and female alike, for posing challenges to the creative feminine. Section...
Regarding Mono Lake by Elizabeth Kenneday
Regarding Mono Lake is a cultural and art history of the Mono Basin, including 56 panoramic images by the author, with details of human history, twentieth century art, and moviemaking lore. Buy this Book In 2011, I was an attendee at the AROHO Retreat at Ghost Ranch. I had an almost-finished book project and thought I was about to publish with a very appropriate Press for my combination art-and-narrative project. As an exhibiting...
Woman with Crows by Ruth Thompson
Woman With Crows is Ruth Thompson’s second book of poems. It explores her own past from ”hungry ghosts” to the Fool-Crone, “dancing what she does not know to dance.” It was a finalist for AROHO’s To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize and includes poems that won the New Millennium Writings and Harpur Palate awards. The poem “The White Queen” has generated conversation about dementia and multidimensional expansion and a new...
Camp Utopia and the Forgiveness Diet by Jenny Ruden
In a desperate attempt to get out of going to fat camp, sixteen-year-old Baltimore teen Bethany Stern tries what promises to be the last diet she will ever need—The Forgiveness Diet. Where Louise Rennison and My So-Called Life meet John Green, Camp Utopia and the Forgiveness Diet is a contemporary account of a timeless teenage conundrum: how to conquer self-doubt, release grudges, and ultimately, grow up. 2010 was not the best...
Cry of the Nightbird, edited by Michelle Wing et al.
In Cry of the Nightbird: Writers Against Domestic Violence (edited by Michelle Wing, Ann Hutchinson and Kate Farrell), thirty-eight writers speak out in more than fifty prose and poetry pieces of a hidden tragedy: violence in homes, living in fear, and forced silence. Authors from every walk of life and every aspect of this difficult issue raise their voices as one to end this silence, to bring freedom and release for themselves and...
Body on the Wall by Michelle Wing
Michelle Wing’s poetry collection, Body on the Wall, is a haunting and deeply personal work, divided into four sections based on the elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Untangling the many threads that make up a life, Wing writes about being a daughter, violence against women and girls, mental illness, her identity as a lesbian, her love for her wife, and the search for spiritual direction. Beyond this, in each poem, whether it is...
flesh to bone by ire’ne lara silva
Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural sensibility, the stories in 6th Gift of Freedom Fiction Finalist ire’ne lara silva’s debut short story collection flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, silva metes out a furious justice—a whirling, lyrical energy—that scatters the landscape...
Interrobang by Jessica Piazza
Interrobang, winner of the 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize Judge: Eloise Klein Healy Interrobang is a collection of mostly sonnets that play with various clinical “phobias” and “philias.” Jessica’s stunning, playful, dark, and haunting poems illustrate how “even the worst-case scenario of these pathologies are, fundamentally, just extensions of the dark truths to which every one of...
Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam
Diane Gilliam, AROHO’s 6th Gift of Freedom Award Winner, has been widely recognized for the voice of honesty, beauty, and resilience that she has given to Appalachian culture and history–among the many other subjects of her writing. Her second book, Kettle Bottom, is a collection of poems written in the voices of people living in the coal camps at the time of the 1920-21 West Virginia Mine Wars. Kettle Bottom has won...
An Unquenchable Thirst by Mary Johnson
About An Unquenchable Thirst “Readers…will find themselves transported into another world by this powerful, revealing memoir. An aspirant to the Missionaries of Charity at age 19, the author spent 20 years living a life both extraordinarily simple and heart-wrenchingly complex. Johnson skillfully demonstrates this juxtaposition through her writing—mundane events, such as gathering eggs or learning to play the piano, often have...
Makara by Kristen Ringman
Makara by Kristen Ringman, 2011 Kenny Fries Fellow In Makara, Ringman celebrates the space between human and animal selves with tenderness and precision. —Bhanu Kapil Buy This Book Receiving an AROHO Fellowship allowed me the gift of attending my first weeklong writing retreat, but that wasn’t all. AROHO gave me the space and connections I needed to finally fulfill my life-long dream of becoming a published writer....
Spoke & Dark by Carolyn Guinzio
Spoke & Dark by Carolyn Guinzio, To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize Winner, 2010 Judge: Alice Quinn There is no word for the place between the dying hand and the living hand that holds it, but there is a space between those hands. Spoke & Dark dwells there, in the tensions that inhere between one thing & another: lost & found, future & past, life & afterlife. Using typographical symbols (#, /, and...
Raising Wrecker by Summer Wood
Set amid the giant trees of Northern California, Raising Wrecker by 4th Gift of Freedom Winner, Summer Wood, is the story of nearly-broken boy who unexpectedly finds a family. Called “a big-hearted, big-loving, compassionate book” by Pam Houston, “a rare treat” by the Denver Post, and “an unforgettable novel” by New Mexico Magazine, Raising Wrecker charts two decades of an unconventional family,...
Dancing on One Foot by Shanti Elke Bannwart
Dancing on One Foot by Shanti Elke Bannwart is a memoir about a woman’s lifelong journey to understand and absorb what she experienced in war, and what she came to understand about her country’s participation in a great crime. There is great magic in AROHO’s Retreats at Ghost Ranch: the setting enhances the power of the encounters with fellow writers. We were there during the nights of the falling stars and I...
in the icehouse by Genevieve Kaplan
in the ice house by Genevieve Kaplan, To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize Winner, 2009 Judge: Kate Gale, Ph.D. Genevieve Kaplan’s In the ice house offers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling “at least the beginnings of some disaster” taking place in a landscape that “had no symmetry.” Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as...
Sting and Nest by Barbara Rockman
Sting and Nest by Barbara Rockman received the 2012 National Press Women Poetry Book Prize and the 2012 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. I’ve attended two day-long AROHO conferences and two summer retreats at Ghost Ranch. At every event I found myself held in a community of women who became my sister writers, friends, inspiration and teachers. AROHO gives me refuge and courage to write my bravest poems. It offers the...
Ordinary Angels by Bridget Birdsall
Ordinary Angels, by Bridget Birdsall AROHO planted the seed of possibility in my sometimes dialectic dyslexic writer’s brain that the VOICES of women are sorely needed in the world and that one of those VOICES might just be mine. Thank you AROHO for helping me believe in myself and my writing! As Barb Johnson says, “when one women wins, we all win!” –Bridget Berdsall