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Aguas/Waters introduces the rich and vibrant imagery of Uruguayan poet Miguel Avero to the English-speaking world. Selected works from two of his early collections highlight the legacy of magical realism and rioplatense rhythms in this prolific poet's fierce style. This first bilingual edition matches each original Spanish poem with an inspired translation by Washington D.C. poet Jona Colson. Aguas/Waters is the premier selection in the Biennial WWPH Translation Series.

A kidney swap, a love story and a ray of hope in a memoir - Washington PostA BOOK WE LOVE by NPR Books One of the '5 over 50' debuts in 2023 by Poets & Writers magazineTransplant: A Memoir, is 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. A vibrant, powerful portrait of what it means to be Black, female, and confronting a deadly disease in today's America. Winner of the first annual Washington Writers' Publishing House Creative Nonfiction Award, 2023. .

In K. Avvirin Berlin's debut collection, Leda's Daughters, 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. Like the capacious minds of the women it celebrates, the collection moves between the classical and modern worlds, calling out for affiliation and seeking the elusive place where the beloved dwells. These poems bear witness to the minutiae and small miracles that make up laboring women's lives. Winner of the 2023 Jean Feldman Poetry Award from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.

FUNNY AND DEEPLY MOVING -- Corey Flintoff former foreign correspondent, National Public RadioIn Len Kruger's debut novel, Bad Questions, winner of the 2023 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Award, narrator Billy Blumberg asks lots of questions. Some of them are about the more-or-less-mundane matters of adolescence, and others are far more profound. How do we find forgiveness? How can we know what's in the troubled hearts of others?-- --Washington Independent Review of BooksHumorous 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. From the light of the memorial candle back to 1971 in suburban Washington DC, Bad Questions is the story of Billy Blumberg, who carries guilt over the recent death of his father, a Hebrew school principal. After Billy and his mother move across Montgomery County in suburban Maryland, he encounters Ms. Marvin, a former teacher notorious for her macabre eccentricity. A séance in her apartment veers out of control, leading to a deadly "hex list" and Billy's discovery of his father's fatal secret. The winner of the 2023 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Award. Bad Questions is Len Kruger's debut novel.

Remember how sometimes you'll walk through your usual day and suddenly see something in a way that makes you grin (at least internally) a YES? Sid Gold's poems do that. These poems see clearly and speak the honest language of everyday. Their distinctive energy derives from his gutsy approach and from his surprising and delighting images. Golds poems have the dual good sense of lacking pretension and of carrying evocative pictures of the life energy in his city of Working Vocabulary, a city that welcomes and rewards re-visitings.

An anthology of new fiction and poetry from Washington Writers' Publishing House, a 47-year-old cooperative, all-volunteer press based in the nation's capital. In This Is What America Looks Like, one hundred writers and poets from DC, Maryland and Virginia draw a portrait of the creative state of our union.

"This book helps me remember why I fell in love with poetry in the first place." -- Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal.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. These gorgeous poems sweep the reader as into a parade, of memory, sensation, rhythm, protest.

Elizabeth Knapp's poetry explores the intersections between modern society, personal mortality, and cultural immortality. In this, her 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. With these striking new poems, Knapp establishes herself as one of our most vital and compelling contemporary voices.

Forty-seven stories about family-from flash fiction to full-length works, deeply felt, autobiographical fiction-unfold across the decades from the 1960s to the present day and reveal hopes and fears, truth and grief, and love. This award-winning, debut short story collection will break your heart and carry you home.

Jona Colson's debut poetry collection asks the reader to reconsider ordinary life as something curious, even fantastic. A poet of astonishing and apparently limitless range, he is sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, but always contemplative, tender and wise.

In this brave, elegiac debut, How to Prove a Theory, 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. In the face of loss, the poet describes grief as embodied: "I know / neither how to hold you up nor where / to safely place you down." Revelation's uncanny comfort comes as the "process called trust / keeps happening."Readers will observe Tong's lyrical kinship with poetic predecessors Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore as she seeks to name and explain the inexplicable. Along the way, Tong turns to the visual art of Doris Salcedo, Alice Neel, Monica Cook, Joseph Cornell, and others to articulate absence through post-apocalyptic landscapes, lyrical hypotheses, and mysterious persona poems that make music more than they mourn: "You are everything / if not each moment before. O / transitivity. O verb waiting to be." Trust this poet and her collection to honor the lost and celebrate the living.

Don't Wait to Be Called is a collection of short stories that span the distance from Eritrea and Ethiopia, whose refugee populations author Jacob Weber worked with in 2013 and 2014, all the way to Rustbelt towns of Ohio, where Weber grew up in the shadow of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. These stories range from migrants fleeing for their lives and hanging on to what is left from the dangerous journey to "bros" lifting weights together who just want to get ripped. Weber also covers the 2015 Baltimore Riots through the eyes of a student (Weber's wife was a Baltimore teacher at the time), a dying mathematician's son who tries to master high school math before his father dies, and a single mother just trying to hold it together on a Sunday at the park. Weber twice hits on themes of surveillance, once in a very short story told through the eyes of an eavesdropping translator (Weber himself is a translator for a living), and again through a haunting story of a man who built facilities for the National Security Agency and now wants to spend his retirement in a bath house he built. But the heart of the collection are the four stories of "Habesha" immigrants--those who have come from Ethiopia and Eritrea to the United States to become a new kind of American--"American as Berbere," as one story has it.

Laura Fargas writes about essential things. Her rich, short, taut, and cutting poems are filled with hard-won knowledge. They expand beyond the page and startle us with their insights.-EDWARD HIRSCHThe poems in Laura Fargas' new book are short, very short. Most are a mere seven lines-half a sonnet. Yet each bite-size morsel is as rich and satisfying as a seven-course meal. Each is filled with language both elevated and crude, observations both sacred and profane. They are served to us in ordinary time, time spent between fasting and feasting, but nourishing and green with possibility. How can they be light as an angel's breath and dense as the Book of Knowledge? Because they are created by a master chef, skilled and unstinting. Just pull up a seat. And eat. -BARBARA GOLDBERG

Set between the 1920s and the present day, 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. With a mix of humor and heart, satire and sentiment, this collection captures their everyday struggles for better lives and their hopes for promising futures.

St. Bart's Way is a fictional street developed after the First World War when streetcar lines were extended to Baltimore's leafy outer reaches. From its founding, the community surrounding St. Bart's Way accommodated doctors, lawyers, and bankers who wanted homes conveying a sense of comfort and refinement. But, above all, these people wanted homes standing for permanence and for lives lived to right purpose. Today, the well-built homes of St. Bart's Way, with their architectural elements of a bygone era and promise of stability, continue to attract families seeking sanctuary from an increasingly chaotic world.But at the root of St. Bart's Way is falsehood: the community bordering the streetcar line was built on illegally obtained land, and the stories stemming from that perfidious act form an exploration of values. In one way or another, all the characters come to question the commitments they have made, the prices they have paid, and the lies they have told to others and to themselves. They also come to find that nothing can shelter them from the consequences of their choices. In that sense, these stories are linked thematically.The first story, "The Haint," relates how the property for St. Bart's Way was obtained and how the reverberation of that illegality haunts the neighborhood today. Other stories explore the consequence of love, fulfilled or not; the inescapable pull of history; the fickle nature of memory; and the gift of comfort from unexpected sources. These stories were not originally conceived of as a collection; rather, over the course of several years, ideas having the tincture of something lost, miscalculated or unfulfilled presented themselves and it seemed best to have the characters exploring these questions undertake that process of self-evaluation in front of a backdrop throwing these issues into sharp relief. 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.

Robert Herschbach's debut collection, 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. With precise language and an artist's eye for visual detail, this poet investigates the nature of exploration-geographical, cultural, psychological, erotic-as well as its consequences, whether unintended or longed-for.

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 Harper family is part of a long line of Cherokee tribe leaders, and their knowledge and devotion to retaining their history make Kira long for a sense of place, a sense of self. But 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.

The poems in this volume explore the experiences of love and loss; of motherhood and childhood; and of living between the two cultures of America and Bulgaria.

A new edition of 1970 poetry collection by current Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri who was also a founder of Washington Writers' Publishing House, revised and with a new foreword by editor Caroline Bock.

A new edition of poetry by American University Emeritus Professor Myra Sklarew, focusing on her love of science and natural history, with a foreword by Washington Writers' Publishing House poetry editor Jona Colson.

FELDMAN CASTS A SPELL WITH THESE LAYERED, IMMERSIVE, OCCASIONALLY HILARIOUS STORIES, EACH ONE A MINATURE NOVEL IN ITS DEPTH, ITS WISDOM, ITS AFTERGLOW-- Kathleen WheatonSPENDING TIME IN SUZANNE FELDMAN'S WORLD IS PURE JOY -- Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water and Other StoriesFrom 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. These narratives range in mood from "The Lapedo Child," a tale of discovery and liberation, to "The Witch Bottle," a comic examination of a pair of obsessed next-door neighbors. "Untitled Number 20" explores life among women artists at the end of the Flower Power era and the beginning of the Seventies. "The Stages" is a meditation on one woman's struggle for dignity in the face of divorce and untreatable cancer.Whether it's the end of a marriage, or a struggle for fame, these works probe issues that give us that "shock of recognition" that is the hallmark of great art-wonderful, absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.

We meet a Mayan cowboy, Archimedes, a diamond smuggler and a nightclubbing saint in this collection of poems bound together by the themes of place and origin. In Provenance, Brandel France de Bravo explores not only her own roots, but the roots of words. 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.