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Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | March ​2025 | 182 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-65-3

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COLLEEN ALLES is a native Michigander and award-winning writer. The author of several novels and poetry collections, Colleen works as a developmental editor for Atmosphere Press and is a contributing fiction editor with Barren Magazine. Her work has appeared in Red Cedar Review, Tar River Poetry, The Write Michigan Anthology, The Michigan Poet, and other places. She lives in Grand Rapids. You can find her at www.ColleenAlles.com.

Close to a Flame

​​​​​​Colleen Alles​​

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From a dive bar in Big Rapids, Michigan, to nowhere Ohio, and back, the characters in Close to a Flame are broken in the ways all people are. On a cross-country road trip, Robin can’t stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend. Carol has grown increasingly unhappy in her long marriage to Gerald. On a summer Saturday, Christine comes through for Dalia in an important way. Pat takes his girlfriend, Katie, to San Francisco for what he hopes will be a romantic proposal. Beth’s son, Jonah, gets called to the principal’s office; and Jamie gets a scare from her elderly mother. With her radiant stories, Colleen Alles wants to tell you it’s often the case that deep connections to other people—sometimes friends, sometimes sweethearts, sometimes spouses—help restore what’s broken. 

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​Praise for Close to a Flame


“These stories of love, longing, and grief will make you wiser.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award finalist


“These slices of life eat like slices of a crisp, tasty apple, sometimes sweet and sometimes tart, always flavorful, appealing, and sharply written.” 

—Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations

“As subtle as they are piercing, these stories will tear you open and then stitch you back up. ” 

—Nathan Gower, author of The Act of Disappearing 

“Across these stories, Alles does what only the keenest writers can: she shows her readers their fullest selves.” 

—RS Deeren, author of Enough to Lose

“Fortunately for us, Alles tends to love’s all-too-familiar wounds with compassion and understanding” 

—Phillip Sterling, author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | March ​2025 | 228 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-71-4

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JAMEY GALLAGHER teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County. He has more than fifty pieces published in literary journals, including CutBank, Bull Fiction, and DIAGRAM. He lives in Baltimore.

​​​​American Animism

​​​​​​Jamey Gallagher

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Animals inhabit the edges of the stories in American Animism, the astonishing debut collection from Jamey Gallagher. Veering between realism and magical realism, each story illuminates something necessary, something true. A girl working in a cryptid museum, a boy in the attic of a gift shop on Mystery Hill, a vacation house in Nova Scotia where strange things happen: these are stories of transformation and becoming. 

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​Praise for American Animism


American Animism is a triumph. Jamey Gallagher is a major talent!”

—Andre Dubus III, National Book Award finalist

American Animism is a collection of small treasures, told with an honesty and insight that pull you deeply into new worlds, and leaves you pondering your own.” 

—Tom Coyne, New York Times bestselling author 

“Jamey Gallagher is a master of simple, poignant narratives of displacement, dislocation, and abandonment—these sad sojourns and whispery odysseys produce a detailed topography of the bumpy swales of the American soul. A brilliant debut.”

—J.C. Hallman, author of Say Anarcha

“Damn, these stories are good. Buckle up and hang on.” 

—Christopher Chambers, author of Kind of Blue





​​​Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | February ​2025 | 198 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-74-5

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TOBY LeBLANC is the author of Dark Roux (2022). His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Deep South Magazine, The Writing District, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. He was born in Southern Louisiana and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

​​Soaked

​​​​​​Toby LeBlanc

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One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked. A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn’t know what he is saying. A Vietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane. A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc’s people, do best.

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​Praise for Soaked


"A fully imagined and always surprising take on life along the Gulf of Mexico fifty years and many disasters from now. Yet peopleand the old spirit of Louisianaendure.” 

—Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell

“In these nine brilliant short stories, the Cajuns of southern Louisiana have found their George Orwell. LeBlanc has created vivid, complex, unforgettable characters that come to life on the page. It is great writing, and while these tales are timely, they may well become, like Orwell’s 1984, timeless.”

—Joel Lafayette Fletcher III, author of With Hawks and Angels

“LeBlanc plumbs the depths of human nature, questioning whether people can actually change and, if they can, what is lost or saved in the process. A call for people to wake up to the realities of climate change, but to also never forget how to dream, Soaked is a collection that sings out its accented regional voice to speak with readers everywhere.”

—Joshua Myers, The Indiana Academy​




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | February ​2025 | 230 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-64-6

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BOB JOHNSON is an award-winning short story writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. His work has been published by The Common, Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His story “The Continental Divide” was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

​​​The Continental Divide

​​​​Bob Johnson

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A country woman makes a Sophie’s Choice regarding her family’s survival. A small town marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero must face his role in a brutal locker room ritual. Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson’s blistering debut The Continental Divide explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness…of the divide.

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​Praise for The Continental Divide


"The stories in Bob Johnson’s collection The Continental Divide pulse with tension, their characters grounded in their convictions and using language ripe with country pulp."

Foreword Reviews

"Forget anything you thought you knew about the Midwestthese stories will set you straight.” 

—Charles Baxter, National Book Award Finalist​

“A riveting, powerful literary debut. Bob Johnson is my new favorite writer. From the first story to the last, he has his foot on the gas and never lets up. ”  

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

“These hard-wrought stories chart a course through a richly textured world. . . . Johnson’s clear-eyed sensibility and honest prose show us where the trouble starts and why it’s so hard to find a happy ending that doesn’t include violence.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist

“What Eudora Welty does for Mississippi, The Continental Divide does for Indiana. . . . These stories ripple with life.”

—Matthew Neill Null, author of Allegheny Front

​“With quiet lyricism and great precision, Bob Johnson reveals to us the brutal beauties of the human heart. Riveting, chilling, the stories in this masterful collection will startle, unsettle, and amaze you.”

—E.J. Levy, author of The Cape Doctor​



Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | February ​2025 | 208 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-63-9

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DAVID RICCHIUTE is the author of two poetry collections, Uncertain in the Worst Way (2020) and So Everyone Else Will Know (2018). His writing has appeared in NOON, The Massachusetts Review, The Louisville Review, and Tampa Review, among others. Born in Rhode Island, he lives in Granger, Indiana, and Villa Hills, Kentucky. Learn more at: https://www.davidricchiute.com/​​ 

​Keeping What's Best Left Kept Secret

​​​​David Ricchiute

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An epidemic’s emotional strain drives among victims a stoic resolve to conceal their disability. A mother retreats inside herself, disarmed by the steps of a building she sees. A neighbor’s drooping, palsied cheek belies the expression on the other cheek. A father conceals that he cannot read, and a son struggles with crippling guilt, having been acquitted of a crime he did commit. Stirring and elegant, Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret probes the force of untold secrets on the daily business of making do. In these stories, David Ricchiute uncovers deception teeming with self-deception, and the final returns have much to do with the accidental chemistry of fate.

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​Praise for Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret


"Rich, enigmatic short stories . . . truth is whispered if told at all and sorrows are unnamed but deeply felt.” 

—Barbara Shoup, author of A Commotion in Your Heart

“Flawless performances of enduring literary ‘flaws’ . . . that reanimate the grand indifferent smacks and hard knocks from the likes of Crane, Dreiser, Steinbeck, and London. Read ‘em and weep.”

—Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

“Sly, surprising, and powerful.”

—Valerie Sayers, author of The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories

“Closely observed, elegantly wrought.” 

—Jody Hobbs Hesler, author of Without You Here

​“A work of haunting beauty by an exciting and perceptive writer.”

—Leah McCormack, author of Fugitive Daydreams​


Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$22.95 | February ​2025 | 146 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-73-8

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DAN LIBMAN lives on a farm in northern Illinois, where he collects eggs and sneaks food to the barn cats. His work has appeared in many lit journals. He is the author of two previous volumes of fiction: Book of Grudges (2023) and Married but Looking (2011). 

​​Shocker in Gloomtown

​​​​​Dan Libman

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Praise for Shock​er in Gloomtown

​“Quick, funny, touching, serious, sometimes surreal, with a distinctive colloquial voice.”

   —Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and Interstate, National Book Award Nominee 

“In dry, dark, very funny stories shot through with poignance and compassion, Libman’s outwardly polite folk navigate everyday disappointments, always on the brink, surprised by the possibilities of human inadequacies. Shocker in Gloomtown is the real thing.”

 —Joe Bonomo, author of Field Recordings from the Inside

“Libman is the first great, darkly comic explorer of Rockford, Illinois. In his fictional Rockford, word play and comic gestures are the spiritual currency of the day. And I’m so grateful he’s made it so.”

—Chris Fink, editor of Beloit Fiction Journal

“Realism that’s weightless, surrealism that’s grounding, and a world of experience in between.”

—Aaron Sitze, author of The Andrew Jackson Stories

“Playful, inventive, and funny, Shocker in Gloomtown will crack you up and crack open a new line of sight into the absurdities of the human condition.” 

—Joseph O’Malley, author of Great Escapes from Detroit

“Dan Libman is equally dexterous rendering a fictional work in realism or fabulism, and likewise adroit in blurring the two seamlessly together, with the understated ironic perspective of a Coen Brothers film.”  

—Cris Mazza, author of Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls


Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | February ​2025 | 174 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-52-3

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MANFRED GABRIEL’s short stories have appeared in over two dozen publications, most recently James Gunn’s Ad Astra, Crimson Streets, Liquid Imagination, and Underland Archana. He lives and writes in western Wisconsin, where yes, hot air balloons do occassionally brush up against the trees. 

​​​The Correct Response

​​​​Manfred Gabriel

 

A zombie learns to pass for a living human being. College friends decide to play a child’s game that turns out to be anything but child-like. A man builds a box to keep his loneliness. Two department store elves share a drink on Christmas Eve and discover presents aren’t always neatly wrapped beneath the tree. In The Correct Response, Manfred Gabriel artfully blends the fantastic and the real, culminating in surreal but heartfelt tales of longing, love, and loss against the backdrop of modern America.  

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Praise for The Correct Response

“Manfred Gabriel has created a short-story collection with characters so real they might just grab you by the shirt collar. Vivid scenes, intriguing plots, and spot-on dialog are other hallmarks of the author’s craft. Crack open The Correct Response and enjoy this smorgasbord of nineteen delicious tales. The pages will be turning well past midnight.”

—Jim Guhl, author of South of Luck, Midwest Book Award Winner

“Vivid, haunting and authentic storytelling . . . offering the chance to look past the world we see every day to reveal a new, fathomless one—which maybe has been there all along.”

—Nikki Kallio, author of Finding the Bones

“A subtle blur of lush Midwestern settings and speculative fantasy with characters as real to life as tobacco juice, all haunted by the question we’ve feared to put to our own selves: Has anything ever made you happy?

—Steve Fox, author of Sometimes Creek









Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | February ​2025 | 198 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-70-7

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MARIE ZHUIKOV is an award-winning science writer. She is the author of Meander North (2023), a memoir in essays that earned a silver Midwest Book Award for nature writing, and the novels Plover Landing (2014) and Eye of the Wolf (2011). A science communicator for the Wisconsin Sea Grant Program, she lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

​​​​​​The Path of Totality: Stories & A Novella

​​Marie Zhuikov

A young man is mystified by why he can’t see an eclipse. A scammer falls for a woman he is targeting. A nondescript gray house hides a secret from a curious woman walking her dog. A girl discovers a mummified Viking bog boy while on a birding tour. A college student gets trapped in a biosphere after hours. Hemingway’s stolen early stories are found in New Jersey. Singing in the shower takes on a whole new meaning. And a librarian develops her own theories about the influence of trees. United by the power of appearances to deceive and captivate, Marie Zhuikov’s tales glisten with the magic and menace of everyday lives.​​

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Praise for The Path of Totality: Stories & A Novella

​“Each of the spine-tingling scenarios will delight and surprise, bringing you to unexpected frontiers—all without ever straying far from the yearnings of the human heart.”

—Carol Dunbar, author of The Net Beneath Us

“These stories, rich in emotional metaphors that play out in magical ways, remind us to tread carefully and to always pay attention.”

—Sigurd Brown, author of The Girl in Duluth

“A gem of a collection. . . . Readers will get carried away—just like these memorable characters get carried away—into imaginative worlds full of mystery and wonder.”

—Jim Ray Daniels, author of The Perp Walk

“Not all of Zhuikov’s characters find peace and harmony, for the damned soul and the broken heart and the heart’s longing are nothing to fool with. But the few who find love . . . enter paradise.”

—Anthony Bukoski, author of The Blondes of Wisconsin



Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | January ​2025 | 182 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-62-2

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WILLIAM LUVAAS has published four novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (1986), Going Under (1994), Beneath The Coyote Hills (2016), and Welcome to Saint Angel (2018), plus two story collections: A Working Man’s Apocrypha (2007) and Ashes Rain Down (2013), which was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lucinda.

​​​​​​​​​​​The Three Devils

and Other Stories

​​​​William Luvaas​​

From acclaimed writer William Luvaas comes a new collection of dark and devastating tales. With grit and grace, chaos and compassion, angst and absolution, The Three Devils makes us reckon with the maelstrom, all while wrestling with the longings of the busted and beautiful human heart.

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Praise for The Three Devils and​ Other Stories

“William Luvaas, my friends, is a wild-eyed genius” 

​​—Lauren Groff, National Book Award Finalist​

"Wildly imaginative and always engaging."

​​—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer Prize Finalist​

“A rare read, a post-apocalyptic odyssey that’s fun.”

—George Michelson Foy, author of The Last Green Light

“A nightmarish vision of the inevitable conclusion of the world we’ve created today.”

—Chase Dearinger, author of This New Dark

“The apocalypse may be no fun to live through but in fiction it can offer thrills and chills—and insights into the human condition at the intersection of resilience and evil. William Luvaas’s The Three Devils delivers these and more. ”

—Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables

​“The Three Devils is one of those masterpieces that is hilarious until it isn’t—a window into the human psyche and the destiny of our species.”

—Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | November ​2024 | 244 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-48-6

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ROB DAVIDSON is the author of four previous fiction collections: What Some Would Call Lies (2018), Spectators (2017), The Farther Shore (2012), and Field Observations (2001). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Normal School, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and American literature at California State University, Chico.

​​​​​​​​Welcome Back to the World

A Novella & Stories

​​Rob Davidson​​

Mark cares for his ailing ex-wife in his home and comes to terms with his unresolved anger and hurt; American expatriates Will and Margaret become close but platonic friends, united in their loneliness and love for Taiwan and its complexities. Heartbroken over his parents’ divorce, Jon longs for a reconciliation that his father insists will never happen. Grant, smitten with Melinda, learns valuable lessons about race, tolerance, and accepting change. And the title novella, a tale of identity, faith, and betrayal, documents the long, slow process of recovery from trauma and the promise of renewal. In stories of finding life anew in ever-changing circumstances, Rob Davidson’s soaring prose reminds us that hope is visible in the darkest of times. 

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Praise for Welcome Back to the World

“A master of the short form.” 

​​—Patricia Henley, National Book Award Finalist

“These striking, deeply moving stories took me in and held me. Their generous range and tender vision won my heart.”

—Joan Frank, author of Where You’re All Going

“A master craftsman at home in the heart of his greatest subject in this collection—love.” 

—Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand

“A reminder that brightness, despite the odds, is possible.” 

—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults

“Vivid and sensual, compelling and mysterious . .. a delight”

—Fred Arroyo, author of Sown in Earth

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Dan Barnett Nancy's Bookshelf (NSPR)





Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | November ​2024 | 240 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-39-4

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KEN POST, originally from the suburbs of New Jersey, retired from the Forest Service after working in Alaska for forty years. His fiction has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Entropy, Red Rock Review, Cirque, and others. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. He lives in Juneau, Alaska.

​​​​​​​Greyhound Cowboy and Other Stories

​​Ken Post

A young woman unexpectedly shows up at a remote Forest Service fire lookout; a fly-fishing guide is stranded with a cowboy in a Montana Greyhound bus station during a blizzard; an Afghanistan war veteran struggles with PTSD and a decades-long family conflict with a family across the lake; a hot shot crew firefighter wards off her demons with backbreaking work, until a fire catches up with her; a son tries to honor his parent’s last wishes to dispose of their ashes on their old family farm, only to be stymied by the current owner. Caught in the grandeur and sweep of nature, the characters in Greyhound Cowboy and Other Stories experience revelation, camaraderie, relationships on the brink, and danger. In his perceptive debut, Ken Post peeks into frailty, confrontation, and friendship, illuminating the fascinating and fragile details that make up our lives. 

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Praise for Greyhound Cowboy and Other Stories

“This little book is big in many ways . . . the stories warmed me with their humanity, surprised me with their twists and turns, and often expanded my imagination.” 

—Kim Heacox, author of Jimmy Bluefeather, National Outdoor Book Award Winner

“Ken Post’s characters learn about life the hard way, and so do we, in stories of both grit and humor, action and reflection, blindness and insight: it is a reward to experience these stories.” 

—Evan Morgan Williams, author of Stories of the New West

“Ken Post’s collection of tales are alive with unexpected twists that will keep the reader turning the pages.” 

—Lynn Schooler, author of Walking Home

“This magnificent collection should be savored around a campfire or under the covers on a cold night . . . a thrilling and satisfying read..” 

​​—Michael Freed-Thall, author of Horodno Burning





​​Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$26.95 | October ​2024 | 258 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-43-1

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HEIDI BELL is an award-winning writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in many literary publications, including Crazyhorse, New England Review, The Good Men Project, the Chicago Reader, Southeast Review, and The Seattle Review, where she won the Bentley Prize for Fiction. She is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships in Literature. She lives in Aurora, Illinois.

​​​​Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse

​​​and Other Stories

Heidi Bell​


Two sisters play an unsettling game; a child witnesses a casually violent neighborhood ritual; an up-and-coming young professional is disturbed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; a woman’s ideal life unfolds in the pages of a mail-order catalog. The Midwestern men and women, girls and boys who populate Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories are united by a yearning—for answers or simply for relief—that is often twisted by their baser impulses. With lyricism, humor both dark and playful, and brutal clarity, Heidi Bell approaches reality sideways in her sensational debut collection.

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Praise for Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse

“With her mix of light and dark, lovable and unlikable characters, and hope and regret, Bell’s collection is part Neil Gaiman and part Donald Barthelme, with a touch of Joyce Carol Oates.”

BOOKLIST, starred review

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"Bell knows Americans, and it is her masterful ability to capture the sentiments of these people that allows for her to so accurately portray the immediacy of their spiraling perspectives. In a way, it’s all about the details again. What makes her characters and their trivial issues so prevalent and demanding is her ability to flesh them out with all those tiny facets that most of us recognize but fail to name, guided by her own years of observing the classic American: the Midwesterner."

New City Lit

​​“An exquisite, achingly rendered collection of stories.” 

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award

“A golden thread of magic, shape-shifting, and light along the edges is at play in these stories, often allowing a glimpse of another world altogether, the richer universe where stories are born.”

—Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the National Book Award

“Heidi Bell is one of our great unsung writers. Let these stories sing to you. Listen to their music and you will fall under their spell as I did.” 

—Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder

​“A fierce and funny collection from a highly original and enchanting sensibility. Bell’s stories shine a brilliant light on the marvelous, the disturbing, the uncanny.”

—Andy Mozina, author of Tandem

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

New City LitBook Q&As with Deborah Kalb 

LitHub Largehearted Boy




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | October ​2024 | 164 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-42-4

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GARY SCHANBACHER is the award-winning author of Crossing Purgatory (2013), winner of the SPUR Award from the Western Writers of America and the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and Migration Patterns (2007), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the High Plains First Book Award. He lives in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver, Colorado.

The Waterman

​​Gary Schanbacher

Clayton Royster is a waterman living in the fictional coastal town of Sand Point, Virginia. Since childhood in the 1940s, he’s plied the local waters, crabbing in the estuaries, and fishing the open waters of the sea. But when Loretta Pine, the teenage wife of a much older man, comes to town, things change. With powerful and salty prose, Gary Schanbacher shows how the decisions we make reverberate through the decades of our lives and affect not only our destiny but also the destinies of those around us.

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Praise for The Waterman

“A moving testament to what fulfillment can mean, what regret can engender, how simple desire can tangle a life.” 

—William Haywood Henderson, author of Augusta Locke

“A gorgeous collection populated with memorable, original characters.” 

—Tiffany Quay Tyson, author of The Past is Never 

“Gary Schanbacher performs a miraculous feat, riding the fierce wave of naturalism to gracefully land in the sands of community. ”

—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. 

​“The Waterman has a spare, crystalline beauty to it, much like the ocean on a clear day. It’s an incredible book.” 

—Michael Henry, author of Active Gods

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Rocky Mountain ReaderColorado Sun


Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | October ​2024 | 208 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-46-2

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KIM SUHR is the award-winning author of Nothing to Lose (Cornerstone Press 2018), and her work has appeared in Midwest Review, 8142 Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Moot Point, and others. She is the director of Red Oak Writing in southeastern Wisconsin.

​​​​Close Call

​​​Kim Suhr

A door-to-door salesman’s visit shows Carol a new side of her mother and threatens the security they both had taken for granted; a woman finds out what happens when we’re “too busy to die”; a woman in her fifties celebrates her newly augmented body parts; four friends try to breech a chasm in their friendship by planning a reunion; and a researcher examines his relationship to creativity in a world where it has been deemed a mental illness. Carefully crafted, surprising, and humane, the stories in Kim Suhr’s Close Call unveil emotion in tight spaces, hearts in turmoil, and the searching soul of the Midwest.​

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Praise for Close Call

“Kim Suhr sucks you right in, comfy as can be, until you didn’t see it coming opens a window on human nature, and there is a piercing little poke right in your heart.”

—Sandra Scofield, National Book Award finalist

Close Call gets us close—we slip in and out of various bodies just in time to start squirming. . . there’s not a single wasted page.”

—Maggie Ginsberg, author of Still True

“Kim Suhr is a natural storyteller, and the dazzling variety of tales in Close Call is all the proof a reader needs.” 

—Robert Lopez, author of Good People

“The clarity, humor, and inventiveness of Kim Suhr’s work is a joy.”  

—Jane Hamilton, author of The Excellent Lombards

“Generous stories with great heart and tenderness toward the human condition.” 

—Anne-Marie Oomen, Michigan Author Award Winner

“A finely rendered collection of stories told in a sure and strong voice.”

—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Temple of Air​

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Madison Magazine


Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | October ​2024 | 176 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-45-5

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MICHAEL DARCHER, a former casino dealer and gaming instructor, taught English for a quarter century at Pierce College in Washington state. His stories have appeared in High Plains Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Zone 3, Berkeley Fiction Review, The Nebraska Review, and elsewhere. Michael resides above Commencement Bay in Tacoma with his wife, Joanne.

​​​​The Silver State Stories

​Michael Darcher​

Amidst the casinos of Reno, Nevada, the “Biggest Little City in the World,” Michael Darcher introduces us to the dealers, workers, and patrons of the Aces Oasis Casino. Like Leonard, a blackjack dealer who makes earrings out of flies meant for fishing; James, a craps dealer who falls in love with Phyllis in a bad year for relationships; Liz, a blackjack dealer who struggles with how big a part she played in a player’s suicide; and Gessler, a slots worker who reckons with his girlfriend Polly’s charge to be more. Darcher’s steady, assured, and compassionate prose shows us more than high rollers and underbellies. He gives us real people. 

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Praise for The Silver State Stories

“Exquisitely funny, wry, and tender. This book is hard to put down.” 

—Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House

​“Colorful and poetic, funny and humane.”

—Matthew Sullivan, author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

The Silver State Stories gets Nevada and its people exactly right.”

—Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To​

“Unstinting insight and a masterful sense of particularity.” 

—Peter Donahue, author of Three Sides Water

“Darcher uncovers the true euphoria and desperation of human nature one pull, one roll, one wager at a time.”

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze​

“Polished, funny, at times unnerving.”

—Barry Kitterman, author of The Baker’s Boy​


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$24.95 | October ​2024 | 184 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-44-8

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SARA REISH DESMOND’s work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Water~Stone Review, among other journals. Her short stories have been finalists for the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award and the Copper Nickel Award. She teaches and writes just north of Boston, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
 

​What We Might Become

​Sara Reish Desmond

An adolescent struggles with race and sexuality and her father’s return from war; a spiteful social pariah finally reveals her rumored, freakish robot anatomy when she attends the senior prom with her geriatric date; an unemployed husband grows enamored with the new immigrant next door as she reveals her tragic past; and a new widower is tormented by the smell of his neighbor’s expert baking and feigns that he is part bear. Sara Reish Desmond’s characters find themselves at the threshold; on the verge of discovery, navigating the space between childhood and adulthood, between fidelity and scandal, between honesty and deceit. Deft and moving, What We Might Become shares the uncertainty about how we ought to live in transitional moments and, perhaps more desperately, forever.

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Praise for What We Might Become

“These stories are vivid and taut, and one of Desmond’s great virtues is that she doesn’t get in the way of her characters. She lets them breathe. ”

—Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days

“I will return to these haunting, perfect stories, and their evocative landscapes, again and again.”

—Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild

“The cadence of the sentences, the probing, unsettling voice of her narrators, and the dark conclusions she reaches about the underside of contemporary American life. . . Desmond writes with quiet fury. Anyone who loves short stories will want to own this one.” 

—Jess Row, author of The New Earth​

“You will not shake these stories easily. I certainly have not.”

—Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia



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$24.95 | August ​2024 | 252 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-41-7

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MICHAEL MATTES grew up in Delaware and later spent time in San Francisco, Chicago, and the Desert Southwest. His fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, West Branch, Cirque, and elsewhere. He and his family now call western Washington home and hope to never leave. More at msmattes.wordpress.com​ 


​​​​An Instinct for Movement

​Michael Mattes​

A boy sets off to trace the aquatic life in a local stream and is overtaken by the journey itself … A single day of violence and comic absurdity separates an aimless young man from the confining reality he’s known to the unimagined one he’ll have to navigate. These are the opening entries in An Instinct for Movement, a collection marked by fraught relationships, shifting trapdoors, and the often unreliable instincts of its linking central character. From a blighted Mid-Atlantic city to pre-millennium San Francisco to the hills of California pot country to a woodland outpost in the Pacific Northwest: with each new dislocation, Michael Mattes strives for clarion, momentary truths born of human comedy.

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Praise for An Instinct for Movement

​“One of the best collections of riveting, character driven short stories I’ve ever read.”

—Robert Dugoni, New York Times Best-Selling Author
The World Played Chess and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

“In elegant, often beautiful prose, An Instinct for Movement . . .  brings us a world observed by a perceptive and wondering consciousness.”

—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

“In Mattes’s fiction, all indeed connect in the gorgeously rendered locales offered in near-mystical appreciation of the eco-quotidian.”

—Andrew Tonkovich, author of Keeping Tahoe Blue

“Mattes writes life the way it’s remembered, not as a single stream of experience but as intermittent blasts of feeling.”

—Kevin Clouther, author of Maximum Speed

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$26.95 | April ​2024 | 242 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-34-9

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RYAN HABERMEYER is the author of the short story collection, The Science of Lost Futures (2018). His prize-winning stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing & Literature at Salisbury University. 

Find him at rhabermeyer.com

​​​​Salt Folk

Ryan Habermeyer​

Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah’s past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer’s reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.

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Praise for Salt Folk

“Like being given a tour of an eccentric inventor’s laboratory. No matter how closely you watch, from the flick of a switch to the final electrical zap, you never follow exactly how you find, in your open palms, each story’s small miracle.”

—Zach Powers, author of Gravity Changes

“A relentlessly inventive, standout collection. Habermeyer is a fearless and ardent writer. His sentences shimmer, startle, and slay.”

—Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running

“One of the most innovative and eclectic collections I’ve read in some time…with unforgettable characters, unforeseeable twists, and profound observation.”

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze

“The crazed crystalline stories found in Habermeyer’s multifaceted Salt Folk work together like cantilevered mobiles of pristine prisms chiming in a gale force wind of pure segmented light.”

—Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana 

​“Habermeyer is an extraordinary stylist…introducing us to a world of marvels transformed through the alchemy of his prose.”

—Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | April ​2024 | 192 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-19-6

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PATRICK NEVINS is the author of Man in a Cage (2022). His stories have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Sundial Magazine, Jabberwock Review, The MacGuffin, and other journals. He lives with his family in Columbus, Indiana, where he is an associate professor of English.

​The Commission of Inquiry

Patrick Nevins

A chimpanzee is stolen from Cameroon and rocketed to space as the test flight for John Glenn’s historic orbit; a former child star struggles to stay sober; a prehistoric mammal imagines a better version of itself; a trio of ragpickers strip Union and Confederate dead of their clothes; a couple sees the woods move; the former commissaire of the French Congo investigates atrocities. Eclectic in its breadth and startling in its power, The Commission of Inquiry investigates life, death, and other matters, as Patrick Nevins delivers twenty stories built to surprise, challenge, and even change us.

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Praise for The Commission of Inquiry

“‘But I want to know what they’re saying.’ Readers of this wide-ranging, far-reaching collection will keep turning pages, spurred on by that wanting, too.”

—Sara Lippmann, author of Lech and Jerks

The Commission of Inquiry traverses time and space and even species to plumb the depths of human failings and longings. . . . Through it all, Patrick Nevins moors his impressive range of subjects with profound insights into who we are.”

—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.

“Wonderful and bracing doesn’t begin to describe this collection, and I read these stories with the enthusiasm of a kid given a View-Master for the first time. Nevins’ range is incredible, and as one moves through these stories the feeling of what is possible opens up for the reader even as, for the characters, things may be–and often are–closing down. Enos the chimp has my heart.”

—Ethan Rutherford, author of Farthest South: Stories​




Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | April ​2024 | 198 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-20-2

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TIM CONRAD holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a PhD from Western Michigan University. His work has been published in journals such as Story, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Quarterly West. He teaches creative writing at Michigan State University.

The Machine We Trust

Tim Conrad

A boy attends summer camp where campers are tasked with managing their own flocks of sheep; a set of brothers kidnap their father’s prized pet buffalo; a young man travels the country with his mother, a peripatetic professor who has pioneered a radical service-learning curriculum; an unemployed man attempts to teach himself to beat a polygraph test. In The Machine We Trust, Tim Conrad’s narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape—sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away.

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Praise for The Machine We Trust

“Tim Conrad is something of a Raymond Carver for the new millennium—his everyday people glow with the power of loss and suppressed longing.”

—Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals In Everyday Life

“Gifted with a devilish wit like Lorrie Moore’s, and George Saunders’ marvelous sense of the weird—and a gloriously imaginative and utterly compelling voice entirely his own—Tim Conrad gives us tales both fantastically fabulist and devastatingly true. So nestle in—just as if you were curling up in Paul Bunyan’s enormous outstretched palm.”

—Thisbe Nissen, author of How Other People Make Love

“Tim Conrad’s debut story collection takes readers through an American Midwest filled with men and women living on the margins, surrounded by chain-link fences, both resented and needed, not just of the landscape but of the heart. Together, these stories are a tender portrait of our desire for love and acceptance, all told in language that is suspenseful, moving, and perfectly written.”

—Michael Nye, author of Until We Have Faces



Maximum Speed_Front Cover.png$24.95 | April ​2024 | 190 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-21-9

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BRETT BIEBEL is the author of 48 Blitz (2020) and Winter Dance Party (2023). His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction and featured in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Stories. He teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

​​​Gridlock

Brett Biebel

There’s a 200-mile long traffic jam on I-94, and people are going to be stuck there for days. Maybe weeks. Told in striking, kinetic flashes, Brett Biebel’s Gridlock explores the event, its origins in American political, athletic, and romantic institutions, and its impact on all the individual lives that go on in its shadow. Four roommates order a Japanese sex robot. A man designs a book review algorithm. Sentient pitching machines debate life, death, and violence, and bags of deli ham fly across trashy grocery store parking lots as the cars idle. Day in and day out. Their gears grinding down to nothing, or, well. Maybe it’s something after all.

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Praise for Gridlock

“At the end of this book I felt as if I had been witness both to dazzling diagnosis and dazzling mystery.”

—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback SpecialNational Book Award finalist

“Poignant and inspired, evaporating the gridlock that can blind us all to our own humanity.”

—Leigh Allison Wilson, author of From the Bottom Up 

“Each wildly different story in Gridlock begins with a terrific first sentence that announces the world of the story, then moves along at a headlong, hellbent pace that is totally mesmerizing to end with a perfect last line.”

—Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications 

“Beautifully crafted, these stories will invite you, no, tell you to read and re-read them as you get to know the wonderful landscape Brett Biebel has created.”

—Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love






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$24.95 | November ​2023 | 178 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-09-7

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KEVIN CLOUTHER is the author of We Were Flying to Chicago: Stories (2014). He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.

M​​aximum Speed​

Kevin Clouther​

Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters’ lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects ​Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.​

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To ​order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Maximum Speed

“These wonderfully evocative, interconnected stories are about growing up, growing apart, and how modern communications technology enables distant figures from the past to suddenly be brought into the present.”

—Booklist

"Kevin Clouther joins the ranks of Karen Russell and Lauren Groff with this hypnagogic livestream from America's unconscious id . . . AKA Florida. With wounded, spiked prose in the Chekhovian observational style, brightened with a humane levity of heart, Maximum Speed spins us around the maypole of the gouged lives of four friends. This book has authorial soul, and soul lasts, as will these diamond-scratched pages." 

—Tom Paine, author of Scar Vegas

“With meticulous craft and profound compassion, Clouther conjures this vibrant collection of connected stories of friends wrestling the ghosts of their past. Balancing heart and humor, Maximum Speed bears witness to the raw hope of youth and the bittersweet wisdom of age.” 

—Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of The Air You Breathe

“These elegantly braided stories, told in precise, crystalline prose, create a vivid portrait of friendship and loneliness, of nostalgia and loss. Moving effortlessly between humor and heartbreak, these stories add up, as in the best linked collections, to a rich and varied world of tenderness and beauty.” 

—Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design and The Empty House: Stories 


Reviews, Interviews, & Media
Booklist​​​​Large Hearted Boy​​​Hypertext

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$24.95 | November ​2023 | 208 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-10-3

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JOHN MICHAEL CUMMMINGS is the award-winning author of three novels and over one hundred short stories. His short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He lives in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where his family has lived for six generations.


​The​​ Spirit in My Shoes

John Michael Cummings​

Featuring twenty-three stories, John Michael Cummings’s debut story collection brims with the vitality and complexity of our shared humanity. In tales that conjure comparisons to John Updike, Raymond Carver, and William Gay, Cummings tells the truth about loneliness, relationships, and the common struggles we all face with prose both precise and vibrant. Cummings’s voice, assured yet questioning, will stay with you long after you’ve finished The Spirit in My Shoes.​​

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To ​order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

​Praise for The Spirit in My Shoes

​“Alternatingly funny, touching, and at times surprising, but wholly satisfying in its weight and depth.”

Kali White, author of The Monsters We Make

“A remarkable collection of stories thrumming with subtle probing humor and quiet insight.”

—Aimee Parkison, author of Girl Zoo

“In the flawed, indomitable spirits of these characters, we see ourselves. An unforgettable collection.” 

—Gerry Wilson, author of Crosscurrents and Other Stories

“A wonderfully thoughtful work by an obvious master of the short form.” 

—Sung J. Woo, author of Skin Deep and Everything Asian

“In the wide range of Cummings’s concerns, readers will find not only much to contemplate but also much to celebrate.” 

—Ron Tanner, author of Far West and Missile Paradise 
​​​
Reviews, Interviews, & Media
The Journal (Harpers Ferry, WV)​​​​The Frederick News-Post (WV)​​​
Charleston Gazette-Mail (WV)​​​​Spirit of Jefferson (Charles Town, WV)​​​
Eastern Panhandle Talk​​​West Virginia Morning (PBS) 
Author 2 Author 

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$24.95 | November ​2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-13-4​

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JANE CURTIS holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and attended New York University on a National Endowment for the Humanities award. Her stories have been published in Midwest Review and the Rosebud Literary Magazine. She lives in southeastern Wisconsin.


​Reach Her in This Light​​​​​

​Jane Curtis

Eleanor, a strong woman who pours disastrous relationships into writing stories; Amy, radicalized by racist interactions directed toward her daughter; Maddy, taken to writing the lyrics to her own sad songs; and Louise, who is saved from despondency by her vegetable garden. Four women living in Madison, Wisconsin. Four lives woven together by Jane Curtis, in her vibrant and explorative debut. Told with flashes of song, sensuality, and sincerity, Reach Her in This Light unfolds as a fiery and empathetic mosaic of lives lived, as four women each search for their own kind of freedom.

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To ​order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Reach Her in This Light

“Like fragments of colored glass, these brief pieces present glimmering shards of happening, moments of connection in the lives of an intriguing cast of characters who blink in and out of each other’s stories, gradually accumulating to combine into a colorfully vivid mosaic of coming of age in the Midwest in the 1960s.” 

—Christopher Chambers, author of Kind of Blue and Delta 88

“These spare, linked, beautifully written stories rise like bread into a poetic and moving whole. Whole lives, notably less affluent women’s lives, are revealed and celebrated in their telling.”  

—Jeffrey D. Boldt, author of Blue Lake

“Despite upheaval, these women are centered and true, never bitter or jaded. They endure husbands dying, lovers who wander in and slip off, a child’s untimely passing, adolescent rebellion and skids into poverty. Still, they reach one another, and others in the light.” 

—Ruth Holladay, The Indianapolis Star
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​Reviews & Interviews

Madison Magazine


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$24.95 | October ​2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-12-7

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LEAH MCCORMACK's work has appeared in New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Redivider, Fiction, Prairie Fire, The Portland Review, Hotel Amerika, Big Muddy, and REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Dakota.

​Fugit​ive Daydreams

Leah McCormack​​​

Blending elements of fiction and nonfiction, Fugitive Daydreams dares to challenge the boundaries of the short story by blurring the lines between convention and experimentation. Leah McCormack’s debut collection features a house as alive as its inhabitants, a mother dealing with multiple sclerosis and dementia, a pair of conjoined twins getting separated, dysfunctional families struggling with expectations and middle-class realities, and a writer pushing against gendered aggression. With power and stylistic inventiveness, McCormack embraces the absurd while refusing to look away from painful truths.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

​Praise for Fugitive Daydreams

“McCormack’s stories do nothing to protect anyone—especially the writer herself, and she is a writer, and a good one.” 

—Pete Dexter, author of Paris Trout, National Book Award winner

“I love the restless energy of this collection, and I admire its perfect fusion of urgency and playfulness.” 

—Chris Bachelder, ​author of The Throwback Special, National Book Award finalist

​“Fugitive Daydreams is an important and beautifully written book.” 

—Patrick O’Keefe, author of The Visitors and The Hill Road, Story Prize winner 

​“By turns furious, melancholy, and tender, these stories are gems.”  

—Leah Stewart, author of What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw

​“A remarkable, and remarkably brave, first book.” 

—Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? ​




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$24.95 | October ​2023 | 212 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-08-0

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JEFF ESTERHOLM is an award-winning story writer. His fiction has been published widely in Midwestern Gothic, Shotgun Honey, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Beat to a Pulp, Crime Factory, Mystery Tribune, Pulp Modern, Tough, Yellow Mama, and many other venues. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin.​

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​​​​The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories​​

Jeff Esterholm​

​The last good time in the Great Lakes region, the so-called Third Coast gouged into the Upper Midwest of America, was in the shipbuilding era of the two world wars. But even in 1941, in Port Nicollet, Wisconsin, a certain taint grew and spread. It was a port city: sketchy men; fresh-faced boys; salesmen with their sample cases; able-bodied seamen. Always passing through. Occasionally, the locals glimpsed opportunity, but, just as quickly, it was gone. The prospect of something better could not gain purchase on the south shore of Lake Superior. It was as if the people and region, an area in the distant past promoted by developers as the next Chicago, had slipped the moorings and drifted, minus captain and crew, on the waters of Lake Superior. In The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories, Jeff Esterholm explores what happens when people slip their moorings and are set adrift.

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FINALIST, Fiction, Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards 2024

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

​Prai​​se for The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories

“Esterholm writes characters who burrow under your skin. One of the best collections of short crime fiction I’ve read in recent memory.” 

—William Boyle, author of Shoot the Moonlight Out

“Maybe the neon of a North End tavern or the lake boats calling in the lonely night brings out the worst in people. One thing I know is Esterholm can write.” 

—Anthony Bukoski, author of The Blondes of Wisconsin

​“Peopled with folks who live dark lives without knowing exactly the why’s or how’s of how it all happened . . . history, story, despair, hope, all in such sparse wording. A compelling read.” 

—Marcie Rendon, author of Sinister Graves

​“A master storyteller at work.” 

—C.W. Blackwell, author of Hard Mountain Clay​

"Esterholm delivers a watertight collection of short crime stories deftly written with prose cut to the bone but never lacking a poet's sensibilities."

—Sean Patrick Little, author of the Abe & Duff Mysteries


Reviews & Interviews

The Cap Times (Madison, WI)​​​Wisconsin Writers Association​
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel​Madison MagazineSean Patrick Little

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$24.95 | October ​2023 | 234 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-07-3

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JODY HOBBS HESLER lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills. Her stories and other work have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, CRAFT, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.




​​What​ Mak​es You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better

Jody Hobbs Hesler​​​

​The grisly death of the hermit outsider in a tight-knit neighborhood prompts a young mom to yearn for solitude. A man wrestles with regrets from a 30-year-old affair while his wife hovers toward death in the ICU. An older, childless woman aches to rescue the seemingly mistreated child she observes in the grocery store. And a girl's desire to avoid the party her father dragged her to nearly gets her abducted. Told with restraint and deep compassion against the backdrop of Virginia back streets and small towns, Jody Hobbs Hesler's debut collection shines with its portraits of longing, disconnection, and the ache for renewal and redemption that comes from our own frailties.​

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

​Praise for What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better

"Hobbs Hesler disappears behind her deliberate prose, and each character embodies their primary desire: alone time, forgiveness, a do-over, attention, love from a daughter, a thank you, to be part of the family again, a baby. As they seek out solutions, taking missteps along the way, her characters each meet a moment of truth, and we get to observe their intimate thought processes to keep themselves sane, to keep them alive until tomorrow."

—Another Chicago Magazine

"Thoughtfully crafted and skillfully realized...the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of feeling better."

Necessary Fiction

"If you ever met Jody Hobbs Hesler, you might find it strange that she writes about alienation, loneliness, and the tragic way people so often misunderstand each other—she is so warm and emotionally intelligent herself. It must be these qualities that give her such preternatural insight into the troubled characters of the stories in her debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These colorful figures include a repentant ex-con, a defensive hotel housekeeper, and an entitled developer with a thing for life-size candy mascots and a knack for choosing the exact wrong gifts, but what they all have in common is the struggle to empathize and see beyond their own preconceptions."

Rain Taxi 

"Hesler's writing is carefully crafted, with plots that create suspense and often a surprising twist at the end. Although potential for horror lurks in some of the plots, it is an uplifting book that speaks about the ways people can help make each other's lives better."

Rivanna Review

"In this brilliant debut...Hesler demonstrates the ironic understanding of humanity, the deep compassion, and the literary skill of a serious, new fiction writer."

Exacting Clam

"Eloquent, articulate, original, memorable, deftly crafted, What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better: Stories by author Jody Hobbs Hesler is a literary treat throughout and an especially and unreservedly recommended pick for personal reading lists, as well as community, and college/university library Literary Fiction & Short Story Anthology collections."

Midwest Book Review

There’s a loneliness running through this collection, a recognition that no matter how many people we may have in our circle, we can never fully connect with another, never quite shake that sense of detachment that comes with being an individual.

Heavy Feather Review

​​Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Another Chicago MagazineHypertext​​Electric Literature​​​

The Writer's Story​Midwest Book Review​​​Vol. 1 Brooklyn​​

Writer's Digest​​​​​BloomThe Cavalier Daily (VA)​​​​

CRAFT​​Cambridge Common Writers Heavy Feather Review 

Exacting ClamDaily Progress Necessary Fiction 

GSMC Book Review




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$24.95 | February ​2023 | 204 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-35-9


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JENNY ROBERTSON is a fiction writer and poet from Minnesota and Michigan currently living in Wisconsin. Her chapbook of short fiction, Hard Winter, First Thaw, was published in 2009. Her fiction has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, South Carolina Review, Cutthroat, Gulf Stream, Flyway, and SLAB.



​Hoist House: A Novella & Stories

Jenny Robertson

Cher Bebe manages the dance floor and flogs patrons at a nightclub while his estranged father takes his last breaths back home; a man walks a moonlit trail through his ancestral lands on his way to abduct a child; a Michigan tornado spotter grieves the end of his marriage; Maggie Pancake returns to her Minnesota hometown, jilted by her fiancée, a professional clown; and the titular novella follows fourteen-year-old Sadie and her Finnish immigrant mining family in Iron Range Minnesota in the months leading up to the Milford Mining disaster of 1924. With power and compassion, Jenny Robertson weaves tales that explore the precarity of immigrant life, worker exploitation, the tensions and dangers inherent in growing up, and the ephemeral nature of the American Dream.


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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Hoist House

Hoist House, made me ache for home, for a sense of place so palpable I could feel it stinging in my throat. A hoist house contains machinery that moves (objects, people) from below to above ground. The stories and novella, just like their namesake, lift the unseen to the surface.

North American Review

Hoist House is a delightful read, and Robertson is a powerful writer. Her details have teeth that sink in and stick, and her esense of story leaves the reader more than sated.

South Carolina Review

​“These comedies and tragedies are sweaty and fragrant, brimming with energy, and the language is exuberant.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist, author of American Salvage

​​“Beautiful and shattering, these stories cut deep grooves into my memory.” 

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Relinquenda

​“Jenny Robertson’s stories evoke my favorite Midwestern writers: Jon Hassler, Joan Chase, and Jim Harrison—no-nonsense storytellers who lure you in with a sentence and then keep you rapt with prose as straight as an arrow aimed at your heart. Hoist House is everything you could possibly want in​​ a debut.”

—John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph

“Every next story took me deeper, and deeper into that human realm where hilarity and tears combine in a rare and lovely kind of magic.”

—Jack Driscoll, author of 20 Stories: New & Selected

“Robertson has conjured a stunning debut that every reader should cherish.”

—Craig Lesley, author of Winterkill and The Sky Fisherman

Reviews & Interviews

Grey Sea & Sky (Hillary Moses Mohaupt)​ KAXE (Northern Minnesota)

North American ReviewSouth Carolina ReviewSouth Carolina Review.pdf 

Hypertext




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$21.95 | February 2023 | 148 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-34-2

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COREY MERTES grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. His short stories have appeared in many journals and have been shortlisted for the Tartts Fiction Award, the American Fiction Short Story Award, and the Hudson Prize. This is his first collection.

​Self-Defense

Corey Mertes

A morally dubious chef reacts unconventionally when he comes to believe that his prized dog has killed the pet rabbit of the middle-school girl next door; an angry, second-rate actor seeks a life-affirming path in a place that offers only oddities and  dreams; two gamblers descend into chaos and despair; and a love affair between an aging Texas wildcatter and a mercurial art teacher at his son’s school goes tragically awry. Crackling with lyricism, hard-bitten truths, and soaring prose, the twelve stories in Corey Mertes’s Self-Defense follow their down-on-their-luck protagonists through life’s narrow passes to its snow-covered valleys below.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Self-Defense

“There’s no artifice to be found here. Mertes is the real deal, not so much writing stories as he is bringing them out of hiding as though by séance.” 

—Jeff Vande Zande, author of Rules of Order

"With striking prose and exactitude, Corey Mertes's Self-Defense follows a collection of strange, sad, but wholly unique characters through twelve unforgettable stories, all seeking a version of self-defense against their own demons and disappointments. A gritty but emotionally sensitive clutch of tales."

Kali White, author of The Monsters We Make

“The characters in Corey Mertes’s debut collection desperately try to defend themselves against the lure of drugs and booze and the scourges of illness and infidelity. Self-Defense may be full of failed dreams, but it is charged with memorable characters, whip-smart dialogue, and bleak landscapes rendered beautiful by the author’s lyrical prose.” 

—Rita Ciresi, author of Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian

Reviews & Interviews

West Trade Review In Kansas CityThe Pitch 

Kansas City StarKansas City Star - Local Literary Spotlight (051423).pdf


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$24.95 | February 2023 | 198 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-36-6

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JAMES B. DE MONTE received an MFA from Kent State University and a PhD from the University of Toledo. His novella, Brotherhood (2015), was longlisted for Shakespeare and Company’s Paris Literary Prize, and his short fiction has appeared in The Showcase, Fjords Review, and Italian America. He lives in Northeast Ohio with his wife and four sons.​

​Where Are Your People From?

James B. De Monte

Meet Giacomo Agostini, retired coal miner and first-generation American, a son of foreigners, a Depression kid who never got over it, the second-oldest living member of the St. Theresa’s Knights of Columbus hall, and a pick-and-shovel man from Appalachian Ohio. Spanning ninety years, James B. De Monte’s Where Are Your People From? explores the fellowship and hardship of Midwest Italian-Americans in the post-industrial Appalachian region of Ohio through the eyes of a son of immigrants. With authenticity, humor, and grace, De Monte delivers a truly American story.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Where Are Your People From?

“A completely original, ambitious collection of stories skillfully united by voice, place, and spirit. While spanning decades of struggle in one Italian-American family, De Monte writes with both humor and pathos of these complex, unvarnished working-class lives.” 

—Jim Ray Daniels, author of The Perp Walk and Gun/Shy

“By turns elegaic and brimming with vivid, immediate life, James DeMonte’s collection evokes the soul and concern of Carlo Levi and the gorgeous rough detail of the Appalachian writer Breece Pancake. The reach is bold, novelistic, the individual stories break ground into the soil of Frank O’Connor’s ‘submerged populations."

—Varley O'Connor, author of The Welsh Fasting Girl and The Master's Muse

“It’s about storylines, and how those stories we pass on give us the power to know ourselves, and the hope that we might be remembered after we’re gone.”

​—Joseph Bates, author of The Strikeout Artist and Tomorrowland: Stories

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$24.95 | February 2023 | 192 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-33-5

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NIKKI KALLIO is an award-winning writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Minerva Rising, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in central Wisconsin.​



​Finding the Bones: Stories & A Novella

Nikki Kallio​​

A father tries to explain to his daughter what Earth was like, a boy believes his mother has been abducted by aliens, a ghost hunter wonders if her absent father is a deceased serial killer, and in the near future the sun makes people go insane. Weaving science fiction, gothic storytelling, and paranormality into eight stories and a novella, Nikki Kallio establishes herself as a fresh, innovative, and compassionate voice in speculative fiction and magical realism.

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LONGLIST, Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, Wisconsin Writers Awards 2023

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FINALIST, Fiction: Short Story​, American Book Fest Best Book Awards 2023 

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​FINALIST, Cygnus Award in Science Fiction, Chanticleer International Book Awards 2023

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​​To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise f​​​or Finding the Bones

“With themes of home and homelessness, destruction and humanity, Nikki Kallio delivers a focused and nuanced collection with whimsical and surreal connections to Wisconsin and the Midwest. These are very fine stories.” 

—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Godspeed

“Nikki Kallio . . . deftly moves through time and space to illustrate griefs both massive and particular, as well as the impossibility of understanding and loving anything new.” 

Rebecca Meacham, author of Let’s Do and Morbid Curiosities

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection" Wisconsin Writers Association

Windy City Reviews A Geography of ReadingReaders' Favorite 



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$24.95 | January 2023 | 234 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-76-4

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STEVE FOX is the winner of the Rick Bass/Montana Prize for Fiction, an American Book Fest Best Book Award, and the Zona Gale Award. His work has appeared in or been recognized by Midwestern Gothic, Narrative Magazine, The Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Sciences & Letters, The Iowa Review, Whitefish Review, Cutbank, the Wisconsin Writers Association, and more. Steve lives in Wisconsin with his wife, three boys, and one dog.



​Someti​mes Creek

Steve Fox

The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox’s debut story collection, Sometimes Creek, traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox’s clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek.

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WINNER, Fiction: Short Story, American Book Fest Best Book Awards 2023 

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WINNER, Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction, Wisconsin Writers Awards 2022

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FINALIST, Indie Fiction, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Awards 2023

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Someti​mes Creek

"An astute, confident writer spins grim but entrancing tales."

​—Kirkus Reviews

“Perfectly Midwestern, perfect portraits of perfectly imperfect people. Like coal that never turns into diamonds, but sparks up just the same.” 

​—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

“You fall into these words, are enveloped by these lives, troubled by the uncanny—coming away from this collection moved, haunted, and not quite intact.”

—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion

“Endlessly surprising, strange, and satisfying.”

—Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest

“Hardscrabble and tender, these seventeen story gems gleam in Midwestern dust.”

—Amy Cipolla Barnes, author of Ambrotypes

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Kirkus Reviews Madison MagazineWisconsin State Journal

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection" Madison BookBeat

Wisconsin Writers Association CutBank (interview)

CutBank (review) Twin Cities Pioneer Press

Eyes on Imagination​ Hudson Star Observer​​

New Books in Literature​​ Wisconsin People & Ideas​​


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$24.95 | January 2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-77-1

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JOE BAUMANN is the author of Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise. His fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and many others.​


​The Plagues​

Joe Baumann

The biblical plagues that overtook Egypt in the book of Exodus are transported into the twenty-first century in The Plagues, a collection of eleven stories that take place primarily in St. Louis, Missouri, and its surrounding suburban areas, and Lafayette, Louisiana. Frogs, flies, blood, and boils descend upon a cast of primarily young, LGBTQ+ characters, all searching in some way for love and acceptance amidst burgeoning sexual awakenings. Equal parts playful and personal, Joe Baumann’s The Plagues does more than recast the past; it charts a way forward.

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To order directly from the press, email 
cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Plagues

“Over and again, Baumann’s characters reach across the ever-widening gulfs opened by the ever-increasing weirdness of their worlds for human connection, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but that’s where the hope lies.” 

Adam Brooke Davis, editor of Green Hills Literary Lantern

“Joe Baumann is a force of nature, and his collection is imaginative, heartfelt, and brilliant, and an absolute must-have.” 

Aura Martin, author of Butterflies Over Flame

Reviews & Interviews

Peculiar Journal


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$24.95 | November 2022 | 220 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-72-6

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CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS was born in Madison, Wisconsin and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana. He’s back in Wisconsin where he works as a bartender, an editor, and a teacher in a state prison.



​Kind of Blue

Christopher Chambers

The stories in Kind of Blue juke and jive in an unpredictable voice-driven romp. Set in rural Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Duluth, Milwaukee, Detroit, New Orleans, Houston, and South Florida, these are stories that start and stop and surprise, swerving all over the road.These are stories of wanderlust and music, loss and misdirection, disasters large and small. With the sound and rhythm of language driving each tale, Christopher Chambers gives voice to the working- and middle-class worlds of the American Midwest and the South.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Kind of Blue

“I finished it feeling as if the man had left little pieces of his soul on every page, and I swear to God I lost count of the number of sentences I wish I had written.” 

Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

“Chambers accomplishes what only the best writers can; he makes every character feel both universal and unique, each setting both a vacation and a return home.” 

M.O. Walsh, New York Times bestselling author of My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize

Reviews & Interviews

Madison Magazine


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$28.95 | October 2022 | 374 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-73-3

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ELISE GREGORY received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. Gregory’s poems and fiction have appeared in various, national literary journals. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Domestic Spiral and Aftermath, as well as the co-editor of an anthology, All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood (with Emily Gwinn). She lives with her family and animals in western Wisconsin.​

​The Clayfields

Elise Gregory

In The Clayfields, Elise Gregory’s powerful debut, the lives of three women are threaded together through the changing backdrops of farming communities in the twenty-first century. Where country churches are closing and old man bars are turning into wineries, an eclectic mix of characters must decide to evolve with new forces or leave their settler roots for new lives.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Clayfields

“Elise Gregory has brought a world to life in this beautiful, engaging book. ” 

Samuel Ligon, author of Wonderland

The Clayfields is a sensual and heartfelt debut.” 

Keith Lesmeister, author of We Could Have Been Happy Here

Reviews

Volume One   Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection"

​Twin Cities Pioneer Press Cutleaf

Wisconsin People & Ideas




$21.95 | March 2022 | 150 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-04-3

eBook | 978-1-960329-16-5​

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DAWN BURNS is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction and founder and co-organizer of the SwampFire Retreat for Artists and Writers. She was the recipient of a 2014 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Fiction. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.


​Evangelina​ Everyday

Dawn Burns

Evangelina is as everyday as women come. If she were a landscape, she'd be a patch of woods on the edge of a fallow Indiana field, her edges visible from all directions from miles away. Nothing special on the outside. A disturbance to nobody. One might think her a boring, self-contained Midwestern housewife. Mixing humor and sincerity, Dawn Burns roots her debut collection firmly in the minutiae of Midwestern life, focusing on the inner life of one who suffers the annoyances of a Midwestern lifestyle in a manner all her own, a manner filled with anxious contemplation of the worth of her life.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Evangelina Everyday

Evangelina Everyday is dazzling in its balance of satiric fun and serious storytelling, underscoring the stifling safety of traditional women’s roles and the vulnerability involved in accepting one’s own socially disruptive desires.” 

Mary Catherine Harper, author of Some Gods Don’t Need Saints

“Evangelina dreams of what feels to her like the boldest fantasy of all: getting to somehow be her full self. Burns renders this vivid inner world with compassion and a sharp eye for emotional detail. As a result, Evangelina Everyday is an invitation to hope—to hope that what is bound can become free.” 

David Ebenbach, author of Miss Portland and How to Mars

Reviews

Steve Henn ​Pan-o-ply: Story & Art Michiana


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$21.95 | January 2022 | 268 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-67-0

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JAMIE LYN SMITH is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Yemassee, and Bayou. She is a 2020 recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.​


Township​

Jamie Lyn Smith

Set in Appalachian Ohio, Jamie Lyn Smith’s debut short story collection, Township, explores a region and the rotating cast of characters who call it home. With honesty and empathy, Smith closely examines the strains that intimate family ties put on lives worn raw by collective history. Ultimately, the nine stories in Township interrogate the notion of reconciliation, examining whether people can truly change and if forgiveness is possible.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Township

“Supple, deeply rooted in place, and astonishing in their bite and wit, the stories in Township reveal Jamie Lyn Smith’s mastery of the form.” 

David Lynn, Editor Emeritus of The Kenyon Review

“Jamie Lyn Smith’s voice rings with the authenticity of hard-won wisdom. The stories in her debut collection, Township, open the hearts of the broken and put-upon and find the underside of the overlooked, the ignored, the tossed-away, the miscreant, the wild, the wandering.” 

Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Bright Forever

Reviews & Interviews

Kenyon CollegeBexley Public Library (OH)Dayton Daily News (OH) 

Writer Writer Pants on Fire Now, Appalachia


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$18.95 | December 2020 | 202 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-64-9

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PATRICIA ANN MCNAIR has managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and taught in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago for many years. She is the author of the award winning collection The Temple of Air.



Responsible Adults 

Patricia Ann McNair

In Responsible Adults, a mother uses her reluctant adolescent daughter as a model for her art photography. “Your mother loves you best when you are ugly,” the girl comes to believe. A stepfather attacks a neighbor boy for exposing a shameful secret to his stepdaughter. A pregnant and undocumented young woman brings new life to a failing church and its dwindling congregation. Farms fail, families break apart, work is hard to come by, and the characters in these fictional Midwestern towns are fueled by grief and hope, loss and desire. What happens when responsible adults are anything but responsible people? When they are at best, irresponsible, and at worst, dangerous?

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Responsible Adults

"​Edgy, empathically imagined, and strongly crafted."​​

Booklist

“Responsible Adults is devastating, in the best possible way. . . . Readers are wiser and more compassionate for knowing these stories.” 

Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage, National Book Award Finalist

"In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking.” 

Christine Maul Rice, author of Swarm Theory

Reviews & Interviews

New City LitNational Book ReviewLiterary Hub 

InterlochenChicago Review of BooksColumbia Chronicle 

Fiction Writers Review Solstice Literary Magazine  Superstition Review Booklist  



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$18.95 | December 2019 | 236 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-61-8

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JOSEPH O'MALLEY was born and raised in Detroit. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now lives in New York City.​



Gre​at Escapes from Detroit

Joseph O'Malley

In Great Escapes from Detroit, Joseph O'Malley tells stories of families living in Detroit. In an imperfect city that beckons and repels, these characters probe the ever-shifting terrain of the human heart, where the tenacious pull and push of love, trepidation, and occasional joy plays out as they navigate the opposing impulses that exist in all families: to embrace their circumstances, or to escape. Whether it's the father who fears he may have spawned a monstrously violent child, the woman overwhelmed by dealing with a crazy neighbor while caring for her ailing father, the teenage boy who finds that asceticism won't shield him from the horrors or the joys of life, or the happy woman who can't help her severely depressed husband, these stories reveal the throbbing kernel of hope that persists even in the most dire circumstances.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Great Escapes from Detroit

“The stories in Great Escapes from Detroit are luminous with what lesser writers miss—the magic and the splendor of the commonplace come alive.” 

Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Bright Forever

"The work in this collection documents high stakes emotional moments while being surprisingly restrained. Great Escapes from Detroit is a marvel." 

Daniel Libman, author of Married but Looking

Reviews 

Bookish


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$18.95 | December 2018 | 242 pp

Paperback | 978-0-984673-97-1

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KIM SUHR lives and writes in south-eastern Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Midwest Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. She is the director of Red Oak Writing.​


Nothing to​ Lose 

Kim Suhr

Drawing on the rich complexity of the American Midwest, Kim Suhr peoples her debut book of fiction with characters that we know, carved out of the Wisconsin landscape and caught between expectation and desire. An Iraq war veteran stalks the streets of Madison. Four drunk friends hunt deer outside of Antigo. A mother tries to save her son. A transplanted New Yorker plots revenge against her husband. A man sobers up and opens a paintball range for Jesus. A woman with nothing to lose waits for her first kiss.

2020 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist! — Kergan Edwards-Stout

FINALIST, Short Story Collections, Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2020-2021

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu


Praise for Nothing to Lose

“It seems as if Kim Suhr doesn’t invent characters; rather, she channels them. She finds a perfect balance between the plainspoken thoughts of her unlikely heroes and the exquisitely chiseled prose of her own voice. 'Oh him,' you might think; 'Oh, her'; and then the punch of a story’s turn makes you gasp with recognition.” 

Sandra Scofield, National Book Award finalist, author of Beyond Deserving, Swim, and The Last Draft

“Suhr’s is the kind of voice that makes me feel held in the storyteller’s hand.” 

Steven Huff, author of Blissful and Other Stories

Reviews & Interviews

Christi Craig Wisconsin Author Review Lake Effect (WUWM 89.7)Milwaukee Journal Sentinel




$18.95 | December 2017 | 188 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-05-0

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SUSANNE DAVIS is an award-winning writer. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction and nonfiction have been included in the Notre Dame Review, Am​erican Short Fiction, Clackamas Literary Review, Harvard Law Bulletin, Feminist Studies, St. Petersburg Review, and others. She lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut.


The Appointed Hour

Susanne Davis

The Appointed Hour shines a compassion​ate light on a changing rural America, spanning generations and locations by exploring the emotions that accompany life’s trials. The heart-wrenching challenges draw Davis's characters together in feelings of love, loss, hope, and community, united throughout history by the place they call home.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Appointed Hour

“A shatteringly original collection of short stories from an extraordinary writer.” 

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

“There are moments and imagery in this collection that will follow you through your days and take your breath away.” 

Maddie Dawson, author of The Stuff That Never Happened

Reviews & Interviews

Carolineleavittville The Day The Daily Campus (UConn) 

​The Heroine's Circle

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$19.95 | March 2025 | 82 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-66-0

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LAUREN K. CARLSON is a poet and spiritual director living in Manistee, Michigan. Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover, and Waxwing. In 2022, she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her manuscript in progress. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. 


​Steelhead

Lauren K. Carlson​

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​​Praise for Steelhead

"A deeply satisfying book to read, filled to the brim with spot-on imagery and set adrift with well-timed phrasing and lines and sudden pauses that make the entire flow come alive with love and candor.”

—Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Steelhead, Lauren K. Carlson’s remarkable debut collection, is a Niedeckerian paean to place, shaped by the waters and winters of the rural Upper Midwest. In their explorations of isolation, family, faith, and the dynamic cross-currents between the natural world and the creative mind, these brilliant poems chart the dovetailings and divergences of ‘life lived/and the life within’ with fierce imagination and grace.”

—Debra Allbery, author of Fimbul-Winter

“Like a fish-ladder allowing the Steelhead to leap falling water, poet Lauren K. Carlson runs language with and against, from observation to revelation. Rooted in the natural world and with great respect for our finitude, these gorgeous poems roam ‘between the life lived/and the live within.’ Formally inventive, rich, utterly alive. Steelhead is a magnificent debut, a collection of poems as ferocious as it is patient and wise. I want to know the world Carlson knows.”  

—Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything


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$21.95 | March 2025 | 100 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-58-5

 

BENJAMIN GANTCHER is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center. He is the author of the poetry collection Snow Farmer (2017), a finalist in several contests, and the poetry chapbook Strings of Math and Custom (2013). Gantcher’s first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Slate, Rhino, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and DIAGRAM. Gantcher was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets and is a former poetry editor of failbetter

He is the editor, publisher and designer of unbound books, “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books,” that can be found @benjamingantcher, at the unbound books Substack, and HERE


​The Coronation of the Ghost

Benjamin Gantcher

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​​Praise for The Coronation of the Ghost

“Visceral, humane, contrarian, often wildly funny or bracingly matter-of-fact . . . brilliant.”

—D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers

"The pathos of this book inheres in Gantcher’s refusal to close the door on others—including nature, ghosts, spirits, and the dead—and in his exacting, bravura animation of these ‘voices / of the non-human world’ we delight, becalmed, knowing that a poet of our time has made a way for us, and a ‘keyhole of instructive light.’” 

—Virginia Konchan, author of Requiem

“Reading as Benjamin Gantcher puts all his heart and energy into imagining what holds the world together, I hear a sound like a song played by bees on a piano left out in the street in the rain—That beautiful tune will stay in your head, making you attend to, struggle with, and marvel at the glittering, the highway, the lantern fly, the irate narrator. It means everything it is supposed to mean and it is so satisfying. Long live this Ghost!”

—Jordan Davis, author of Shell Game

"These poems keep you guessing, keep you on your toes. The sheer range of THINGS in these poems makes each page a little cabinet of wonders.”

—Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants​




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$19.95 | January 2025 | 80 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-61-5

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SUSANNAH SHEFFER is the author of Break and Enter (2021) and This Kind of Knowing (2013). For many years she taught writing workshops for teenagers and now works as a clinical mental health counselor and a writer and researcher focusing on people affected by the death penalty. She lives with her husband in Western Massachusetts.


​​The Stone Tries to Understand the Hands

Susannah Sheffer

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Praise for The Stone Tries to Understand the Hands

“This is a book with a wondrous reach, but it never loses sight of hum​an intimacies and intricacies. Susannah Sheffer is a tremendously gifted poet. Her poems are deftly crafted, luminous.”

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

“These deep, clear, open-hearted poems unfold into stories about love and loss, growth, responsibility, hope. . . . They will go on booming in your heart after you close the book.”

—Polly Shulman, author of the Grimm Legacy series

“Wonderful, enticing poems, tightly bursting with new meanings . . . I loved reading this strong, original collection.”

—Suzanne E. Berger, author of Horizontal Woman

​“These poems are spare and deeply felt. They are at ease with themselves, both surprising and strikingly honest, each one a separate light radiating from a hand closed to protect what it holds.”

—Fleda Brown, author of Flying Through a Hole in the Storm

 


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$21.95 | September 2024 | 98 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-60-8

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ELLEN KOMBIYIL is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook, Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Pleiades, and Ploughshares.

​She is a 2022 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches writing at Hunter College.



​​Love as Invasive Species

Ellen Kombiyil

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Praise for Love as Invasive Species

“Ellen Kombiyil writes out of the unsettling complexity of how we see ourselves and others changing from generation to generation. From grandmother to mother to poet daughter, Kombiyil voices the shifting manners and morals of working class women as they struggle to come to terms with their own sexuality, child-rearing, domestic life, the world of work, aging, illness, physical debility, and death. Everything is put to the test in these poems, particularly the poet’s own ethical understandings as refracted through her memories of childhood and adolescence. But her ambition doesn’t stop there: she’s like Keats in her desire to live in a world of unmediated experience, in which verbally realized sensations deliver reality whole.”

—Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch, winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize 

“Ellen Kombiyil’s Love as Invasive Species follows the shames and silences through matrilineal lines. From primers on girlhood, to a coming of age’s commandments on what not to do to stay safe, Kombiyil explores the familial lessons on gender, class, and power. These inheritances sit like ghosts on the tongue until the needed prayers can be spoken and the unwritten stories given language. The poems excavate the layers of memory to discover if love is taught, inherited, or something invasive.”

—Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2023-2026)

“Ellen Kombiyil’s Love as Invasive Species offers absolution in the subtlest of moments: a wallet with only a nickel in it, a lover’s yakety yak, incidents from a vanished world accessorized by lo-riders and johnny gowns, made meaningful by the weight of memory and the poet’s keen, rigorous attention. Consider this a double album of anti-nostalgia: the story and the flip side/s of the story, together making up a memoir in verse that skillfully blends the narrative and the lyric. Kombiyil’s gorgeous language is a tribute to the flawed workaday heroines of a lineage: ‘Those lilies you nearly crushed,’ who endure near-biblical proportions of suffering and awe, and whose ecstasies reverberate through the generations ‘like knuckles.’”

—Minal Hajratwala, author of Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment

​“The poems in Love as Invasive Species take on generations of women, the traumas they inherit, and the traumas they pass down. One can feel the collection’s speaker willing through words a correction to this pattern while also honoring from where she came, all the while staying brilliantly open-eyed and open-hearted. Designed in two sections that speak back to one another across generations, this collection does what we always hope poetry will do, which is to leave us both companioned and changed. Ellen Kombiyil has written a gorgeous book of resilience, hope, and love—especially love.”

—Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Mom Egg Review


​​​Let It Be Told_Cover_ARC4 (1).jpg$19.95 | September 2024 | 84 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-56-1

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ALLISON WHITTENBERG is a Philadelphia native and the author of several books for young adults, including Maine Under Water (2024), Tutored (2010), Hollywood and Maine (2009), Life Is Fine (2007), and Sweet Thang (2006). Her poetry has been published widely in Redivider, New Orleans Review, Columbia Review, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere.


​​They Were Horrible Cooks

Allison Whittenberg

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Praise for They Were Horribe Cooks

“With honesty, humanity, and wit, They Were Horrible Cooks intermixes historical themes and everyday traumas, boldly laying bare the realities and ironies of a dog-eat-dog world.” 

—Tiya Miles, author of All that She Carried, National Book Award Winner

“Whittenberg never fails to illuminate crucial truths at the center of human experience. These poems cut to the bone and remind the reader of the infinitely tender agonies of being human.” 

—Nomi Eve, author of Henna House

“Allison Whittenberg embraces the topic of family though she’s haunted by memories—she gives us little jewels of poems, many that I savored.” 

—Karen Loeb, author of Jump Rope Queen

​“There is pain in many of these emotional snapshots, but there is also joy. This is a collection that reads easily and rewards rereading often.” 

—Don R​iggs, author of Bilateral Asymmetry

Reviews & Interviews

LouReviews



Let It Be Told_Cover_ARC4 (1).jpg$19.95 | September 2024 | 82 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-55-4

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WENDY WISNER is the author of Morph and Bloom (2013) and Epicenter (2004). Her poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Nashville Review, The Washington Post, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.


​​The New Life

Wendy Wisner

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With fear, joy, ambivalence, and wonder, this braided collection of poems by Wendy Wisner explores motherhood through the lens of a fractured childhood and intergenerational trauma. As the past collides with the present, Wisner moves through the intense years of early motherhood and marriage, to the turmoil of raising children in a volatile, violent world. Shot through with sensuality and sexual vibrancy, The New Life grapples with the impermanence of life, the feeling that all we love could slip through our fingers at any moment. Ultimately, this is a book about healing and renewal—about reconciling past and present, and forging a new life.

Praise for The New Life

"Wisner reminds us to remember that death is part of life. It doesn’t cancel life in our minds, but it makes life more vivid and urgent. Death heightens our awareness that there is much to celebrate and much to be grateful for."

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“Capacious, tender . . . ‘It’s dangerous // to be a baby, a child / in this world,’ Wisner reminds us—but these wise, well-crafted poems insist on the wonder and treasure of raising children, too.”

—Nancy Reddy, author of Pocket Universe

“A stunning collection of poems . . . full of hope and renewal that all should read.”

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides 

​“Candid and sincere, sensual and grounded . . . an intimate and masterful examination of marriage and parenting.”

 —Lisa Ampleman, author of Mom in Space​

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Mom Egg Review Lilithtweetspeak​​




Let It Be Told_Cover_ARC4 (1).jpg$19.95 | September 2024 | 88 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-57-8

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HANNAH DOW is the author of Rosarium (2018). Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Image, The Southern Review, Pleiades, The Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. She received the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, as well as awards and scholarships from Bread Loaf Orion and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hannah lives in Bentonville, Arkansas, and is an Assistant Professor of English and creative writing at Missouri Southern State University. 


​​Cuttings

​Hannah Dow

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Cuttings explores a timeless relationship—a mother and daughter—from meditations on childhood, to adolescence and young adulthood, and finally toward marriage and contemplating motherhood. The mother’s presence, a haunting in fits and bursts, pushes the daughter to reflect on what she was taught, and how she has grown. Accepting who she desires to become, yet resisting that difficult inheritance, the daughter must reckon with her mother’s words, body and spirit. With an eye toward grace, Hannah Dow brilliantly considers what it means to implicate, to blame, to forgive.​

Praise for Cuttings

“Womanhood, the lives of plants and animals, what binds and divides us . . . are all considered with a startling and sustained grace that makes these poems lustrous as pearls.” 

—Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea, National Book Award Finalist

“Cuttings derives its substance from the hope that a loving life can be lived in a troubled world . . . what’s won seems hard-won. It seems real, not fabricated. And what a rare pleasure that is.”

—Michael Ryan, author of New and Selected Poems​



Let It Be Told_Cover_ARC4 (1).jpg$19.95 | Septemeber 2024 | 86 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-59-2

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SARAH PAPE's award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Fourth Genre, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Passages North, The Superstition Review, and many others. She teaches literary editing, publishing, and creative writing at California State University, Chico.​


​​Forgive the Animal

Sarah Pape

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Praise for Forgi​ve the Animal

​“‘One way to lose everything / is to tell the truth’ writes Sarah Pape, and yet, every single piece in her stunning hybrid collection is an act of reclamation born of hard truth-telling. In the way the cubist painters were compelled to break apart a subject in order to observe its component parts anew, Forgive the Animal alters the known shapes of  rage and love, deprivation and abundance, grief and joy. With ferocious compassion for all that is overlooked and undervalued, Pape sings us toward an authentic vision of recovery.”

—Lia Purpura, author of It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful

“An origin story as painful as it is exquisite, Forgive the Animal manifests a self who has reckoned with the calamities of the past and arrived at a place of poised, tough lyricism. In poems that are candid about the brutalities of class, addiction, and desire, Sarah Pape brings together the ‘wild net’ of memory and the ‘knit stitch’ of craft to show what it means to go from wreckage to illumination, despair to sweetness. This beautiful book is ultimately about the idea of home—the home of the body, the home of family, the home of a place—and how home must be incessantly fought-for, earned, and saved.”

—Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

“In Forgive the Animal, Sarah Pape’s disarmingly beautiful new collection of poetry, we humans, and our collected experiences are allowed a fresh rebirth from the crotches of bewilderingly conjoined entities: fish scales and pigs’ feet; a bag of citrus and the tantrums of gravity; death and a tattooed rabbit; a father’s bygone hopscotch square glimpsed through the brine of amber and filth, memory and machine. What exhilarating suspensions Pape fashions! What unlikely ornaments are drowned in them, before being resurrected, a little kinked for the journey, sure, but brighter than before. Pape’s poems testify to the kind of light that—if we dare to be loyal to that which it illuminates—can stretch itself into a strange halo—sometimes fragile, sometimes badass, ever the thing through which incantation can finally pass. What an earth-shattering and awesome book.”

—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers​

 


Let It Be Told_Cover_ARC4 (1).jpg$21.95 | September 2024 | 106 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-53-0

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ORI FIENBERG is the author of the chapbooks Old Habits, New Markets (2020) and Interim Assistant Dean of Having a Rich Inner Life (2023). His writing has appeared in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and many other journals and anthologies. A graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, Ori teaches poetry for Northeastern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois. 


​​Where Babies Come From

Ori Fienberg

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​​Praise for Where Babies Come From

 "A dazzling and eccentric meditation on the anxieties that cling to us.....a collection with heart, a sense of humor, and plenty of punch."

Chicago Review of Books (named a "must read")

“A Field Guide filled with radiant residues of exquisite sentient exhaustions.”

​—Michael Martone, author of Table Talk & Second Thoughts​

“This is a book of possibilities disguised as a book of poems; it’s a delightful catalogue of parallel worlds and what ifs and world problems as word problems. It’s elegant but wild; a raucous party in the subconscious because, as Fienberg writes, “this is a library, [nobody] speaks”. These pieces are things of meaning, things of hidden meaning and overt meaning, things of wordplay and sound and light and great sadness and understanding and they are very, very good.”

—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

“Kind of like Russell Edson, but with more birds and more citrus, and thus with significantly more feathers and significantly less scurvy. Ori Fienberg’s debut is gently zany and wonderfully absurd in the best possible ways.”

—Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

​“Paging prose-poem storks: Where Babies Come From is proof that a three-parent strategy succeeds, Ori Fienberg’s work inventively triangulating Zachary Schomburg, Gabriel García Márquez, and Charles Simic. Stocking his nursery with rusty fogs and psychic ponies—a statue’s dust eater making the toy box cut—Fienberg’s collection has me reevaluating the outlandish and the heart-toll of wished-for child scenarios, surrealism serving as our oasis ‘for ideas that [hover] just out of reach.’ The more I read him, the more I want a nation-library underwritten by ‘packs of tiny gazelles,’ where Ori is laureate.”

—Jon Riccio, author of Agoreography

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Chicago Review of Books


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$21.95 | May 2024 | 100 pp

978-1-960329-29-5 (2nd Ed. Pbk)

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LINDA NEMEC FOSTER has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Bone Country, Talking Diamonds, Amber Necklace from Gdansk, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003–2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.




​​The Blue Divide

Linda Nemec Foster

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Praise for The Blue Divide

“Rich with closely observed detail, narrative depth, and poignant historical reflections, this is a generous and beautiful collection.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With clarity and intensity, Linda Nemec Foster dives deep into the shadows, and deep into the light—global landscape, personal touch; faith and art; the sensual and the cruel; forward and backward through generations of family, acknowledging loss wherever it occurs—all with her trademark tenderness and resilience.”

—Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy and The Middle Ages

“In The Blue Divide, Linda Nemec Foster navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond…to map what flows between us. Testimonial to human endurance and love song to the human spirit, this gem of a book, retrieved from the deep by a poet at the height of her prowess, is as wide as a ‘cavalcade of blue sky’ and as deep as ‘the blue damask of morning.’ Hold these poems up to the light to see the wide blue world (and the world in you) changed, for good.”

—Robert Fanning, author of Severance

“Both a tourist and an inhabitant everywhere: whether in Warsaw, Cleveland, Sarajevo, New York City, Geneva, Poughkeepsie, Oahu, or Ypsilanti, Linda Nemec Foster finds the stuff of poetry and makes it real and tangible. From ‘the thin line of horizon,’ she reminds us that ‘everything/everything is connected. Whether/we can dare to believe it or not.’”

​Laurel Blossom, author of ​Degrees of Latitude

“I love the restlessness…the urgency of the poems in The Blue Divide, and their deep seriousness—how they peer into the present through layers of history, and peer into history through the lens of the personal; how they're on intimate terms with both public and private violence—and can we tell the difference, after all? Tender, brutal, unflinching, magical—these poems [are] infused with the holiness of the real and the mystery of transcendence: ‘face becoming 
blossom becoming starburst becoming sea.’”  

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia and Earth

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Publishers Weekly Behind the Book DMQ SalonNorth of OxfordSouth Florida Poetry Journal Kelly Fordon A Little Too Quiet



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$21.95 | May 2024 | 118 pp Paperback | 978-1-960329-47-9

Image of Cathleen CohenMargaret Rozga is a life-long Wisconsin resident and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2019–2020. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021), which received an honorable mention for the Edna Meundt Poetry Book Award at the 2021 Wisconsin Writers Awards. She lives in Milwaukee. 


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​​Restoring Prairie

Margaret Rozga

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Praise for Restoring Prairie

"A magical journey through time and memory outside of ourselves using mindfulness (underrated), nostalgia, hope, and the music of the created."

Wisconsin Writers Association

"A beautifully unified collection of new poems . . . more than ever, calling for the courage to hope."     

MidAmerica

“From the ‘sparrow song’ and ‘dry pond,’ to the bedside of dying loved ones, to those hidden in the margins of history, these poems journey through grief toward places of hope.” 
 
—Lois Roma-Deeley, author of Like Water in the Palm of My Hand

“Words and emotions that make you feel and believe.”

—Michael McDermott, Co-founder and Director, Black Earth Institute

“Rozga’s poems give memory to all the particulars: the bee, the seed, the grasses and golden honey. And through them we are there, too.”

—Cary Waterman, author of Threshold

“Rozga’s poems hauntingly sing of cumulative loss and the power of nature to bring truth to our wounds.”

—Jennifer Morales, author of Meet Me Halfway

“Restores our hearts and faith through the poet’s wisdom and compassion.”

—Jerod Santek, Founding and Artistic Director, Write On, Door County

“A hymn and prayer for healing, an act of conscience and a journey of the heart.”

—Christian Knoeller, author of Completing the Circle

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Wisconsin Writers Association




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$21.95 | May 2024 | 124 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-37-0

Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition,  2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Reading Competition 2019). She lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis. ​​



The Velvet Book

Rae Gouirand

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Praise for The Velvet Book

"A deeply visceral and textured exploration of grief, queer commitment, and desire. . . . ​Gripping and contemplative, a reminder to pay close attention to the textures and relationships that transform us.​"

—Kaija Holland, Bellingham Review

"When stargazing, certain phenomena can only be seen with peripheral sight. I’m reminded of this fact by Rae Gouirand’s long poem The Velvet Book, whose indirect engagement with subjects yields true vision. Love, death, the past, what might yet be possible, what a self is and is not—all are strung together here like sumptuous, light-shot gems, and the couplets that carry them flow easily as brook water, page into page into page. This book is a beautiful experience."

—Christopher Nelson
 
"By turns measured, sharp, slippery, and ecstatic, Rae Gouirand’s The Velvet Book is a stunning achievement. With a studious, prismatic eye (and ear), Gouirand attends to the sumptuous and mysterious folds of velvet, of the space between what we wear and who we are, of the overlap between interior and exterior. Ultimately, this book is a learned, generous, and queer meditation on commitment, on 'the question of how to stay/and then how to allow for drift,' on the marriage between the self and the other that finds itself in language and the body of the beloved."

—Brent Armendinger
 
"The Velvet Book is restless, it refuses to settle. Under the cover of velvet, dreaming velvet, it feels its edges and disorientations, its zones of endlessness. Here, thought rustles and deepens, velvet-tongued, and moves us to impossibly dizzying places where everything touches. The Velvet Book is heartfelt, questing, sumptuous—a meditation on grief and love and their textures, on what is and isn’t possible to promise, on what it means to be a fully available living self."

—Richard Siken

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Bellingham Review


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$21.95 | April 2024 | 114 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-36-3

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Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her family. A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of Never One for Promises (2018), Little Human Things (2020), and The Weather Gods (2023). 

A Bright Wound

Sarah A. Etlinger

How does a daughter forge her own life in a situation fraught with loss, grief, and the weight of her mother’s expectations? Sarah A. Etlinger’s re-telling of the myth of Persephone and Demeter is coupled with poems about everyday experiences related to motherhood, aging parents, and grief. Themes and symbols associated with Judaism—the pomegranate, the seasonal rituals, the matrilineal culture—play a crucial role as Etlinger explores the interconnectedness of these two ancient cultures. Poems about modern-day life parallel the themes of loss and the unexpected jewels that can come from grief: forgiveness, self-awareness, and a more deeply-rooted connection.​

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Praise for A Bright Wound

"These poems demonstrate something incredibly rare: wisdom."     

—Allison Adair, author of The Clearing

"Etlinger is an apt poet-storyteller, one willing to take the risk of telling the story . . . not in prose but in verse."

—Jenna Goldsmith, author of Crush

"A delicate and tender examination of the many conflicting facets of the self . . . as well as an interrogation of family history, memory, faith, and landscape."

—Heathen Derr-Smith, author of Thrust

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Verse Daily



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$21.95 | April 2024 | 106 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-38-7

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Julia Paul is the author of Staring Down the Tracks (2020) and Shook (2015). She served as the first Poet Laureate of Manchester, Connecticut (2014–2019), and she currently serves as president of the Riverwood Poetry Series, a longstanding reading series in Hartford, Connecticut.​



Table with Burning Candle

Julia Paul

With a dual sense of convulsion and care, Table with Burning Candle tackles a subject that is every parent’s worst nightmare—the death of a child. Grieving the loss of her son to opioid addiction and eventual overdose, Julia Paul questions how to move forward in the face of unspeakable loss. Poems speak to God, the coroner, and death itself. But more so, they confront death, absence, the importance, or lack thereof, of the body, and imagine the afterlife. Yet, as Paul reminds us, everyone knows grief, and sharing grief gives us the courage to live in the madness and beauty of the world, no matter the circumstance.​


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Praise for Table with Burning Candle

"Deeply moving, this requiem, this elegy chronicling the stages of grief through multiple lyric modes, these pages are as musical as they are heartbreaking."

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

"Paul’s emotionally complex rendering of suffering and love knows, finally, that 'death creates a space that only love/can fill' and only love can give a voice."

—Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City

"Inventive and beautiful."

—Pat Hale, author of Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed

"Julia Paul’s intimate conversation with death over the loss of her son to heroin addiction presents as many answers as questions. The only question that remains is—are we too afraid of the answers? Are we too afraid to grieve? In a room of her own, Paul locks the door, dims the light, nestles into her chair and maternally awaits the affirmation within."

—Frederick Douglass Knowles II, author of Sinking in Moonlight Alone

"Vilomah—the Sanskrit word for 'against a natural order'—is used to describe a parent who has lost a child. In Table with Burning Candle, poet Julia Paul journals that aberrant, out-of-kilter state. The mother of an adult son who died of an overdose, Paul offers us a seat at her table of grief, serving poems that vacillate between anguished and angry, hopeless and consumed with magical thinking."

—B. Fulton Jennes, author of Blinded Birds​ 
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$24.95 | February 2024 | 182 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-23-3

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Tara Bracco is the founder and producing artistic director of Poetic People Power. She is a recognized leader in the field of art and social change and has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, Time Out New York, Brooklyn Rail, and HuffPost. Her work as a journalist has been published by Cosmopolitan, American Theatre, Condé Nast Traveler, BUST, and Clamor.

Poetic People Power

edited and created by Tara Bracco

For 20 years, the New York City-based spoken word group Poetic People Power has creatively explored social and political topics, offering insights and solutions to issues that affect our everyday lives and the world around us. This debut anthology invites readers to explore three of their shows about environmental heroes, women's voices, and human rights abuses.

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FINALIST, Performing Arts, National Indie Excellence Awards, 2024

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WINNER, Poetry: Anthology, International Book Awards, 2024

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FINALIST, Social Change, International Book Awards, 2024

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FINALIST, Performing Arts, International Book Awards, 2024

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Praise for Poetic People Power

“Bold! Unflinching activism poetry. Resonant call to action! A heroic first collection.”

Publishers Weekly's BookLife

“A rousing triptych of poetry as a weapon against apathy, ignorance, and inaction.”

Kirkus Reviews

"This anthology is not just a book; it's an exclusive and invaluable collector's item, a treasure for fans of spoken word and social justice...Each page will inspire and empower you to affect the world positively." 

—Midwest Book Review

“This powerful and nuanced collection of performative verse exemplifies Poetic People Power’s impactful use of literary forms to advance social change. The skilled craftsmanship and emotional heft of these works serve as potent reminders of spoken word’s transformative potential.”

—Daniel Gallant, former executive director, Nuyorican Poets Cafe 
 
“This book is a revolution unto itself, a 20-year testament to unwavering dedication to poetry and activism, to looking at hard truths and demanding change. Every poem is a gem. Poetic People Power deserves high praises for this remarkable achievement.”

—Chantal Bilodeau, founding artistic director, Arts & Climate Initiative

“Poets have long used their words for resistance and as mouthpieces for social justice or political movements—José Marti, Julia de Burgos, Pablo Neruda, Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Audre Lorde come to mind. The poets in this book are heirs to this tradition—making known those who are unknown, using art to guide our understanding of what could be, and entrusting us with a call to action.”

—Elena Martínez, folklorist at City Lore

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Kirkus ReviewsBookLifeBadass Lady-Folk Authors Guild 

Hive Poetry CollectivePoets with Purpose Madness Cafe 


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$21.95 | February 2024 | 120 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-26-4

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Sally Ashton is a writer, teacher, and editor-in-chief of DMQ Review. Author of four books, including The Behaviour of Clocks (2019), Ashton specializes in brief forms across genres. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and is headed to the Moon in 2024. She served as Santa Clara County Poet Laureate (2011-2013)

Listening to Mars

Sally Ashton

Listening to Mars serves as a record of our national transit, one a journey from there—before the Covid-19 pandemic—to here—a new now. Our microscopes pinpoint a virus; our telescopes search the edges of the Universe; we look, as we always have, to the heavens for comfort and clarity. Underlying our global social turmoil is the environmental emergency we find ourselves facing, and the irony of seeking new worlds while degrading if not destroying our own. With empathy and precision, Sally Ashton moves through the time of our confinement and an increasingly fractured world, trying to tell the story, to bear witness, to find a way through. Trying to find the glints of light in the journey we are still traveling.

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Praise for Listening to Mars

​“Explores the struggles we face when confronted daily by the miraculous and terrifying universe we inhabit."

—Peter Johnson, author of While the Undertaker Sleeps

“Loss and wonder, dread and awe gyrate throughout the book, spinning like heavenly bodies, the poet equally rigorous and tender in her search for words that make the world look like what it feels like."

—Holly Iglesias, author of Angles of Approach

Listening to Mars beguiles and wonders. Its poignant, glistering poems meditate on beauty and sadness in equal measure, considering the ineffable and absorbing glories of the cosmos, the Covid pandemic and its aftermath, and the importance of a fully engaged quotidian life."

—Cassandra Atherton, co-author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction

“These are poems of witty watchfulness, mystery at the brink of ruin, and sustained delight in the “kabillioness/of it all" that you simply won't want to miss."

—Annie Kim, author of Eros Unbroken


Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Rattle Poetry DMQ Review

 NewPages



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$21.95 | February 2024 | 124 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-35-6

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Hikari Leilani Miya is an LGBTQ Japanese-Filipina American. She is a doctoral student in Florida State University’s program in creative writing, and she holds a Master’s Certification in herpetology from the Amphibian Foundation. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in dozens of in-print and online magazines across North America, including MacGuffin, Chestnut Review, Eunoia Review, Broadkill Review, and Brave Voices.​ ​​


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Do Not Feed the Animal

Hikari Leilani Miya

With poems that glow with energy, humor, heartbreak, and risk, Do Not Feed the Animal, the astonishing debut from Hikari Leilani Miya, breaks molds and reshapes expectations. Food, culture, behavior, voice, and self-portraits—Miya confidently paints her canvas with the shades of her Japanese-Filipina identity. Innovative in approach and moving in message, Do Not Feed the Animal soars by way of the ingenuity and heart of its storyteller.

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Praise for Do Not Feed the Animal

“A ferocious debut."

—Michael Chang, author of Synthetic Jungle

“An incredible debut. Miya's voice feels immediate, very present, like let's go right now, and we go."

—The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective

“Owls try really hard to sound as awesome as Hikari's poems, but they just can't do it. Sorry, owls."

—Kyle Flak, author of Sweatpants Paradise


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$18.95 | February 2024 | 86 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-30-1

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Brady Bove is the author A Day of Humanity (2020). Originally from Franklin, Tennessee, she earned a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2021, prior to moving to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. ​


Dear Lo

Brady Bove

Dear Lo captures the difficulty and raw emotion of moving to a new place and struggling to form meaningful relationships. Highlighting the change of mindset needed to confront the loneliness, find peace, and continue putting yourself out there, Brady Bove delivers a personal series of modern epistles, like prayers in the dark. But being alone, she ultimately discovers, does not have to mean being lonely, as hope leads to healing and community.​

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Praise for Dear Lo

“An intimate, beautifully written poetry collection filled with vivid, dream-like imagery. It will touch the heart of anyone looking for a fresh viewpoint on our relationship to humanity.” 

—Tanya Taylor, author of Why I Tell You Everything

“I’m a voracious reader, but not of as much poetry as I’d like. I suppose it just feels too indulgent. This little luxury of Dear Lo, however, was a delightful reminder to allow my soul what it craves. Brady Bove dances artfully around the most relatable of feelings. Her voice is so clear and somehow familiar that you’d swear you know her. ”

—Alicia King, author of Healing: The Essential Guide to Helping Others Overcome Grief & Loss

“Brady Bove’s searing, obsessive poems are deceptively simple. Beneath each poem in Dear Lo is a palpable urgency—the voice of a woman at a crossroads in life, desirous and searching. I was captivated from the first page and I can’t wait to see what’s next for this talented new poet.”

—Wendy Wisner, author of Morph and Bloom

​Reviews & Interviews

Madison Magazine Read Review Repeat

Harness Magazine Hip Latina​​






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$21.95 | February 2024 | 104 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-28-8

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Michelle Meyer is the author of The Book of She (2021). Her poems have appeared in Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Nebulous, Remington Review, Tabula Rasa Review, Welter Online, and Zoetic, among others. In addition, Michelle is a worldwide house and pet sitter who especially loves cats. She lives in Western Wisconsin.​


The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child

​Michelle Meyer

Written after the unexpected death of her mother, Michelle Meyer’s The Trouble With Being A Childless Only Child takes root in the body, exploring loss and trauma along with the sexual and social dynamics of one woman’s place among men. Part epistolary and part memoir, Meyer questions her own role in creating the boundaries that defined her mother’s life while reaching, often in vain, for clarity through the fog of loss. Serving as both tribute and penance, each poem is a funeral song versed with longing, and ultimately hope, for spiritual release.​

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Praise for The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child

​“A richly rewarding book, one about healing and redemption, a book sutured with forgiveness and bound in love.”

—Robert Hedin, author of At the Great Door of Morning

“By turns delicate, brutal, bitterly funny, and haunting, these poems capture the evolving ways that loss and love intertwine.”  

—Jacqueline West, author of Candle and Pins

“While there is grief in this collection, there is a clarity and acceptance in words that are wise and earned.”

 —Mary Logue, author of Heart Wood: Poems

“These poems are painful dirges and celebratory wakes and, best of all, sometimes both at once.”

—John Graber, author of Thanksgiving Dawn

“Effective...effortless...impossible for any reader to forget.” 

—Emma Snyder, editor-in-chief of Tabula Rasa Review

Reviews & Interviews

Wisconsin Writers AssociationRemington Review


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$21.95 | February 2024 | 106 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-27-1

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Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, and New Letters. She splits her time between a ranch in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains and her residence in Bellingham, Washington.​



Sadness of the Apex Predator​

Dion O'Reilly

The beauty and danger of an isolated family compound, the corruption that privilege can bring, an extensive burn injury that interrupts a girl's life, and the many predators who swoop in when the scarred woman is loosed, again, into the world—all of this is woven throughout Sadness of the Apex Predator, a collection of poems that studies both the way Sapiens feed on one another and also the redemption our hungers can bring.

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Praise for Sadness of the Apex Predator

“A tour de force with urgent poems that address the perilous present and the past that's gotten us here. . . . A burn survivor, O'Reilly writes visceral poems addressing not only the pain but also vulnerability.These are wonderful and necessary poems."

—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

“There's an entire world here, as well as the history of beauty and unspeakable brutality of which the human animal is equally capable. The poems are searingly vivid, public, political, but also intensely and painfully intimate. . . . This is one of my favorite books in recent memory. What a voice."

—Erin Bilieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb

“With language both muscular and merciless, O'Reilly debrides the newfound body of her speaker from aggression. She lays bare some very hard truths, yet these are poems that teach foremost of decency, cautioning us to wean ourselves of the hindbrain's instinct to inflict harm, of the impulse to place ourselves first."

—Rooja Mohassessy, author of When Your Sky Runs Into Mine

Reviews & Interviews

DMQ Review LAdige

Hive Poetry Collective


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$18.95 | February 2024 | 78 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-32-5

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Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing, and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize. Born in Detroit, she now lives in New York.​



Glitter City

Bonnie Jill Emanuel

Like glitter – tiny, precision-cut, reflective particles – the poems in Glitter City shine by reflection with flashes of light. Narrative, cinematic, and at times trance-like, the poems trace their way back in time. From Fulton Street, Brooklyn to Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, over city scaffolds and rural fields, across graveyards and weedy highways, Emanuel’s debut collection grieves and loves, glittering fiercely.  

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Praise for Glitter City

 “In the spare, intense, searching, sometimes sidelong poems of Glitter City, Emanuel writes in burst after burst of light, her images and insights accruing into seriously dazzling designs of illumination.”

—David Groff, author of Live in Suspense

“When you read these poems, you feel them in your body.  You feel these beauties everywhere in the physical matter of your being. Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poems glitter.”

—Matthew Lippman, author of We Are Sleeping with Our Sneakers On

“Emanuel’s eye for texture and surprising insights in poem after poem mean she is always listening.”  

—Sean Singer, author of Today In The Taxi

“In poem after nimble poem, Glitter City is that rarity––a true and sustained pleasure to read.”

​—Elaine Sexton, author of Drive

Reviews & Interviews

Read Poetry​ Pine Hills Review



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$21.95 | February 2024 | 114 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-22-6

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CAILTIN COWAN lives on Michigan's west coast. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, Southeast Review, Denver Quarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Account, and elsewhere. She serves as Director of International Programs and Chair of Creative Writing for Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lakes, Michigan.

Happy Everything

Caitlin Cowan

The urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts Happy Everything, Caitlin Cowan’s powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women’s relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.

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Praise for Happy Everything

“Caitlin Cowan has written the kind of book women poets were once warned against. Plathian in its ferocious truth-telling, it refuses to be shushed, spinning narratives of cheating fathers and husbands, of men with ‘rabbit-rattlesnake / risotto’ on their breath. Cowan brilliantly frames the poems via epigraphs from a cooking and etiquette manual, and offers a sequence of prose poems titled after relics of material culture, as in ‘Leifheit Perle Handheld Crumb Sweeper,’ in which the crumber is ‘a tiny metal cog in / a creaking old machine, an industry as old as I do.’ The underlying reality of the book is the excruciating ache of containment in that creaking machine, and the lyric mode as a powerful mechanism of liberation.”

—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnetswinner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Caitlin Cowan’s Happy Everything takes on birthdays, anniversaries, Easter, Mother’s Day, the New Year, Halloween—all the markers that insist upon celebration, whether or not the speaker feels joy. Happy Everything is the antidote to Hallmark cards, to the Hallmark channel, to forced gaiety as it is thrust upon women to perform happiness and beauty no matter their real life events. Cowan subverts what we think we know about marriage and divorce and the traumas of childhood in a witty, heartbreaking voice all her own. This is a terrific debut!” 

Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

“Pulsing with a deft balance of wisdom and righteous rage, the masterful, lyrical, and gut-punching poems of Happy Everything look the staid picture of domestic ‘happiness’ square in the face and say, for all our sakes, ‘not good enough.’ Cowan’s poems sear with wit, precision, and a steadfast allegiance to the underground sisterhood that keeps us human.”

—Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record

“What a rare and welcome surprise it is to come upon a young poet who possesses enough ambition and talent to illuminate—unforgettably, I think, in the case of Caitlin Cowan—what might be called the too muchness of life, to celebrate that nameless mortal abundance variously ending in ecstasy, despair, hope, grief, prayer, emotional collapse, or silent acceptance. I passionately recommend Happy Everything to any member of the human species who somehow missed the train and hungers to know exactly what it is like to live on planet Earth.”

—B. H. Fairchild, author of An Ordinary Life ​

“At the center of Happy Everything lies a stunning examination of what could too easily be dismissed as a ‘failed marriage,’ brought vividly into focus by Caitlin Cowan’s uncommon gift for rendering even the bleakest scenes with lush particularity and eviscerating wit."
 

—Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon

"A deeply moving collection.”

—Bruce Bond, author of Patmos

"I’ve been waiting for this poet’s first book for a long time. I am left gutted by its brilliance, by its brakelines and linebreaks, by its manifolds and musicality, by its movement between demolition and rebirth, and by the healing it flowers forth.”
  

—Matt W. Miller, author of Tender the River​

​Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Poetry Off the Shelf Lit Hub



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Paperback | 978-1-960329-31-8

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JUDY BRACKETT CROWE's stories and poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of Flat Water: Nebraska Poems (2019) and a member of the Community of Writers. Born in Nebraska, she lives and writes in a small town in the foothills of California’s northern Sierra Nevada.​


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The Watching Sky

Judy Brackett Crowe

Stirring landscapes and a searching heart inform The Watching Sky, the vibrant and compassionate full-length debut from award-winning poet Judy Brackett Crowe. Both a probing exploration of the natural world by various, mostly anonymous, speakers, focusing on intimate encounters and interactions, and a questioning and celebration of identity, Crowe’s astute sense of place grounds her work in fields and mountains, soft light and small roads, stories and sounds. With wonder and hope, The Watching Sky proves that there is always another chance, and plenty of stars to follow.

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Praise for The Watching Sky

“These poems are accessible, grounded in both history and geography of place."

—Terry Lucas, author of The Thing Itself

“An authentic voice that makes us all believers.”

—Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork 

“Crowe stands against the dulling and dumbing down of the world for the life that’s in us and around us.”

—Gene Berson, author of Raveling Travel 

“The poems are full of familiarity, dreaminess, and nostalgia for stories and the myths of common lives.”

—Kirsten Casey, author of Ex Vivo (out of the living body)

“Over each creek and mountain, and under every moon-washed sky, we revel in Crowe’s exquisite affirmations of finding home in nature’s every wingbeat.”

—Julie Valin, author of Songs for Ghosts



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Paperback | 978-1-960329-18-8

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MARK B. HAMILTON is the author of OYO: The Beautiful River (2020) and Confronting the Basilisk (1993). His poetry has been widely published, and he is perhaps the only living person to have traced the entire Lewis and Clark route on their approximate time-table, traveling as they did by paddle and pack mule. ​


​​Lake, River, Mountain

Mark B. Hamilton

In Lake, River, Mountain, Mark B. Hamilton follows the Lewis and Clark route on a physical journey paddling a kayak westward on the Missouri River, across the Great Plains. Immersed in a natural world, the environment is ever-present. The weather, the water, the habitats and fauna, and the lands of Native Americans all merge to conjoin or confront, as they in turn influence beliefs, emotions, and hopes for the future. Hamilton crafts poems both intimate and sweeping, with time and history merging into a confluence of friendship, family, and finding one’s place in the world.

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Praise for Lake, River, Mountain

"Overall, this spellbound paperback edition is a harbinger of compassion, justice, and respect for others, nature, and literature in the ebb and flow of ordinary life. Each line and page flows with the desire for simpler things, harmonious living, and great poetry."

Rocky Mountain Review

​​“Hamilton holds life as close as the shining flower. . . . This is a wise, tough, and joyful collection.” 

—Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Paradise Is Jagged​

“With poetic grace, Mark B. Hamilton brings life’s past portages to the present, never to be forgotten. Lake, River, Mountain expresses the ongoing grandeur of rediscovering relationships with past landscapes.”

—Rich Clow, author of Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman

“If Lewis & Clark had a poet with them, it would have been Mark Hamilton. Visually captive, thought provoking and inspiring. ”  

—Norm Miller, founder of Missouri River Paddlers 

“Mark Hamilton travels in a world made of metaphor. . . . he sees what others might only look at, finds the unexpected relationships.”

—Grace Butcher, founder of The Listening Eye

​Reviews, Interviews, & Media

​Rocky Mountain Review Rocky Mountain Review 77.2-Hamilton.pdf 

Third Wednesday​ ​




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$21.95 | January 2024 | 134 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-17-2​

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RUSSELL THORBURN is the author of several poetry collections, including Somewhere We’ll Leave the World (2017). A National Endowment for the Arts recipient and first poet laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he lives in Marquette with his wife. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, North Dakota Quarterly, Dunes Review, and Sou’wester.



​​Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

Russell Thorburn

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Praise for Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

“This brilliant book immerses us in the impassioned memories of Russell Thorburn.”

—Beverly Matherne, author of Love Potions, Teas, Incantations

​“I know I can always turn to the poems of Russell Thorburn to make me believe that poetry does indeed matter, that it is still a living breathing way of being in the world.”

—Peter Markus, author of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds

“More than any living poet I know, Thorburn invites us into the company of recurring characters inhabiting a fully-formed world of the imagination.”

—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island

“Poems emerge from the page with heart and build to fever, into and out of dislocations in time, place, memory, insight.”

—M. Bartley Seigel, author of​ This Is What They Say

“As John Prine would say, these poems are more like souvenirs. Each is presented and bathed within a threshold where life became . . . what? Maybe where life became alive.”

—Ken Meisel, author of The Light Most Glad of All

“The vision here is Keatsian in its complex figurations of beauty. The poems will break your heart while affirming your faith in the timeless power of music.”

—Cal Freeman, author of Poolside at the Dearborn Inn​

​​“There is a genuine earthiness to the imagistic and engaging narrative poems of Russell Thorburn. There is much news to get from his poems . . . and you’ll be glad to meet his finely crafted words on the page that will continue to feed your soul.”

—M. L. Liebler, author of I Want to Be Once ​​

​Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Public Radio 90 (WNMU)​ Mining Journal​ 

Great Lakes Poetry Festival 2024​ Peter White Public Library

Crazy Wisdom Poetry CircleNorthern Today​​

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$21.95 | November 2023 | 98 pp

978-1-960329-11-0 (2nd Ed. Pbk)

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LINDA NEMEC FOSTER has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Bone Country, The Blue Divide, Amber Necklace from Gdansk, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003–2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.



​​Talking Diamonds

Linda Nemec Foster

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Talking Diamonds

“The brilliance and power of Foster’s language, which has been evident in earlier volumes, is even stronger in this book.”​​

—Lisel Mueller, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“Foster exacts an energy that is, precisely, visionary, even miraculous. This is an effort so widespread in contemporary poetry as itself to seem a commonplace, and one that generally fails. Not so in Talking Diamonds, which challenges, intrigues, awes, and ultimately gratifies, poem after excellent poem.”

—Sydney Lea, author of No Doubt the Nameless and Here

“A humanist at heart, Linda Nemec Foster has demanded from her poetry an artfulness that engages ordinary life. With each new book her work has continued to mature, deepen, console, surprise, and Talking Diamonds is as wise as it is lovely.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern

“[Foster’s] works here are exceptional and gleaming, serving as a reminder that even experts can excel beyond their own greatness.”

​—The Grand Rapids Press


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$21.95 | September 2023 | 100 pp
Paperback | 978-1-96​0329-06-6​

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DAVID SALNER is the author of several poetry collections, including Summer Words: New & Selected Poems (2023). His writing has appeared in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, North American Review, and Ploughshares. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

The Green Va​ul​t Heist

David Salner​​

With his sixth poetry collection, The Green Vault Heist, David Salner assumes a strong voice, with a unique moral vision. In poems covering artistic, literary, social, and autobiographical themes, Salner writes as a poet awed by the sweep of human culture, deeply concerned by the unfolding shambles. Evocative and reflective, Salner’s poems honor the diversity and depth of human resilience and put forward a concerned optimism, even as we yearn for something better.​

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu 


Praise for The Green Vault Heist

The Green Vault ​Heist is not only a beautiful book, it is great company.”

—John Skoyles, Poetry Editor, Ploughshares

“Poems concise yet compelling and ever-celebratory of this life each of us has been given amid ‘the quickness of time.’” 

—Edward Byrne, Editor, Valparaiso Poetry Review

“The book takes us to baby-boom Baltimore and twenty-first-century Spain and orchestrates those places as the grounds where we live, breathe, and savor our freshly encountered human lives.”

—Anne Colwell, Poetry Editor, The Delmarva Review

“David Salner’s poems sing of the dreams and realities of the working life. . . . Natural, compelling, compassionate, and memorable.” 

—David Stephenson, Editor, Pulsebeat



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​​$21.95 | September 2023 | 106 pp
Paperback | 978-1-96​0329-02-8

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CHRISTY PRAHL is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in a host of national and international journals. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan.​



​We Are Reckless

Christy Prahl

In Christy Prahl’s debut collection, her largely narrative-driven poems occupy the fissures of American life, whether exploring self, relations​​hips, or the natural world. The poetic architecture acts as a kind of repair for the subjects themselves, who are often broken but striving. The result is Prahl’s interrogation of the fragile hum of contemporary life as well as the brutalism that acts as its foil. Stirring, sensitive, and sincere, We Are Reckless helps lighten the weight of all we carry by breaking rules, stepping across boundaries, and risking pain for greater purpose.​


NOMINEE, Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan, The Chicago Reader, 2023

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu 

​Praise for We Are Reckless

We Are Reckless is an ode to the imperfection of our brief lives, a tribute to how we break apart and come back together, complete with beautiful scars.”

—Jessica Walsh, author of Book of Gods and Grudges

We Are Reckless captures the extra in the ordinary, deep-diving into the familiar moments of life and making them new, and imbuing them with honesty and heart.”

—Elizabeth Crane, author of This Story Will Change

“The poems in We Are Reckless situate us in wild terrain where love grows, dies, and regenerates again with uncontrollable wonder.”

—Julie Babcock, author of Rules for Rearrangement

We Are Reckless is a book to renew our shared language and our shared world.”

—Toby Altman, author of Discipline Park and Arcadia, Indiana​


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​​$21.95 | September 2023 | 90 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-03-5

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JONATHAN GRAHAM was born along the Ohio River in Martins Ferry, breathed air that chugged from smokestacks at Wheeling Steel, and grew up not far from there in a small enclave of immigrant Slovak coal miners. He resides on a farm/sanctuary in the woodlands of East Central Ohio.




​Everything Waits

Jonathan Graham

​In his lyrical and expansive debut, Jonathan Graham highlights the natural world, the rugged beauty and kinship with a coal-mining region in Appalachia, the loud thunder when relatives and townspeople die in a devastating mine explosion – the yin and yang of love and death, remorse and longing. These poems are hungry, filled with vivid imagery. A quest for beauty in a world of chaos, Everything Waits travels an arc, moves from Appalachia to search the greater natural world beyond: the mountains of Alaska, islands of Lake Erie, beaches of the Carolinas and Gulf Coast, then circles back to the foothills of Ohio’s Appalachia. As the poetry moves from darkness to light and back again into darkness with the promise of light, there exists the divining comfort of “words everywhere,” where it is okay to move away from living.​

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu ​

​Praise for Everythi​​ng Waits

“Jonathan Graham’s attentiveness to the natural world is staggering: the imagery is so precise, so vivid it’s like stepping into a landscape painting. Graham has written a book rich with grace and music.” 

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine: Poems

“Jonathan Graham is an American voice we need—right now, in this time. From the farm, to Wales, to church, to train tunnels with boys, these poems are the truth of life lived, life saved, life lost in front of us. This book captures what you thought language couldn’t.”

—Jeff Knorr, Sacramento Poet Laureate, Emeritus

“Survival, resilience, and ultimately, a quietly joyful wisdom shape the arc of these beautifully made, compelling poems.” 

—Carol D Guerrero-Murphy, author of Bright Path Dark River

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​​$18.95 | September 2023 | 84 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-05-9

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CAMDEN MICHAEL JONES is a writer, educator, and wildland firefighter. His work has been published in the Train River Anthology, the Furious Lit Anthology, and Instapoets, as well as in outdoor magazines throughout the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Fossil, Oregon.


​There is a Corner of Someplace Else

Camden Michael Jones

There is a Corner of Someplace Else is a tapestry of Camden Michael Jones’s life as a wildland firefighter, high school teacher, life-long student, and human living in the 21st century. There are moments of reflection on philosophy and history, moments of panic and fear, of calm, of peace in nature, and throughout there is a constant underlying praise of sweat and work. Taken together, Jones’s spare yet soaring debut challenges readers to see beyond our own vision, to look farther along at what might be our better selves.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu ​

​Praise for There is a Corner of Someplace Else

​“Steeped in the culture of the Pacific Northwest, Camden Michael Jones’s poetry is soothing, startling, tender, moving and insightful. Here are the honest testimonies of the mischievous boy, dedicated teacher, firefighter, historian, husband, outdoorsman, and mindful poet. We find an authentically lived present and a deeply examined past—a rich collection, indeed.” 


—Henry Hughes, author of Back Seat with Fish

“Jones brings a fresh, varied voice to the contemporary poetic conversation. A very worthy book.”

—Marjory E. Lange, author of Telling Tears in the English Renaissance

“Earnest and thought-provoking, this collection is a joy to read.”

—Ryan Topper, Western Oregon University​


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$18.95 | May 2023 | 84 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-00-4

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GAIL HANLON is the author of the chapbooks SIFT (2010) and Mirabilia (2022). She won the National Writer’s Union Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Iowa Review Award and CutBank’s Patricia Goedicke Prize. She lives in New Hampshire.​


Silent Letter​

Gail Hanlon

Silent Letter, the masterful full-length debut from Gail Hanlon, centers around the idea of learning to navigate desire, uncertainty, and grief. In part through art and literature, and in part through alternative ways of knowing, divination, I Ching, Tarot, dreams, meditation, and ritual, Hanlon’s poems explore the natural world and the edges of memory, language, and consciousness. Breathtaking in its c​​oncision and stirring in its empathy, Silent Letter soars.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu
 

Praise for Silent Letter

“Brisk, honed, graven as talismans, but somehow fluent and sensual, always carried by a most subtle sprezzatura—Gail Hanlon’s poems offer so much of what I want from poetry: one person’s brave whistling in the dark, a song that mystery can’t help but envy and give an answer to.” 

—David Rivard, author of Some of You Will Know

“Hanlon’s poems radiate energy and vibrant life; to read them is to partake of a bracing beauty.” 

—Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made

​“Gail Hanlon’s masterful, uneasy mixture of ghostly epistles, imagistic memoir, and involute but plainspoken metaphysics sketch a quiet wilderness of self, a grief-land of beautiful questing and questioning. ” 

—Gregory Lawless, author of Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania​


Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Sundress Reads 


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​$21.95 | May 2023 | 94 pp
Paperback | 979-8-986966-38-0

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MOLLY FULLER is the author of the full-length collection For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems as well as two chapbooks, Tender the Body and The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams of Love. She is the winner of the Gris-Gris Literary Journal Summer Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, New Poetry from the Midwest, 100 Word Story, and Bellingham Review. Fuller is the recipient of Artist Residencies from both Wassaic Project and Vermont Studio Center.​



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Always a Body

Molly Fuller

Rather than seeking answers, Molly Fuller’s Always a Body calls into question the goal of answers, of the idea of linear and logical paths to answers; her poems seek, instead, to replace static answers with a desire to discover meaning through the dynamic of poetic searching. The poems work toward a language that can be used to come to terms with loss through the exploding and re-making of metaphor and what is expected from formal structures of languaging/poetics. Fuller pushes at the confines both of language and the themes of loss, so that the individual and the cosmos converge, creating tensions between what is unified and what is divergent, between other and self, and about the pains and the pleasures of the body, always the body.

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Praise for Always a Body

“These poems are desperately sexy and beautifully deranged—dare to live with them a while and they will disturb you, comfort you, and change you.” 

—Michelle Lewis, author of Animul/Flame

“Fuller’s writing is fluent in the language of critique but never bogged down by it; every crisp syllable erupts with courage, love, confidence, and endurance.” 

—Andrew Rihn, author of Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights

“These musical poems—that move with a rhythm much like a pulse through a body—explore desire, pain, grief, and pleasure.” 

—Nicole Robinson, author of Without a Field Guide​

“Though there’s a lot of pain and sorrow in these poems, there’s also a movement toward a life with its many rewards . . . we realize that what we’ve read as an extended elegy might also be a quiet resurrection.”

—Rick Campbell, author of Sometimes the Light

“Molly Fuller writes, painting the body, painting the body as common denominator, as art and memory, as every reason.”

—Karen Schubert, author of The Compost Reader

“The thread holding these poems together is sturdy and deep-rooted in capturing the atmospheric ephemeral, in making us feel in familiar ways where the body and where our selves fuse and where we break.”

​—Angie Mazakis, author of I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First​


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$21.95 | May 2023 | 104 pp
Paperback | 979-8-986966-39-7

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CATHERINE KYLE is the author of Shelter in Place (2019) and other poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature.​



Fulgurite

Catherine Kyle​​​

Named for the glassy, mazelike structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, Catherine Kyle examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu 

Praise for Fulgurite

“These ethereal poems exist within the mysterious, magical realm of fairytale. Fluid and porous, they have a witchy, spellbound nature. These pieces float.” 

—Allison Titus, author of High Lonesome

“Here is a poet who understands metaphor as deep transformation, whose lines strike like lightning and fuse to startle us into truth at once spiritual and politically vital.” 

—Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“We are fortunate to have Kyle’s many-faceted constructions in the world.” 

—Jennifer Militello, author of The Pact

Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Kirkus Reviews Verse DailySuperstition Review​​

Seven Ponds​​


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Paperback | 979-8-986966-37-3

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MEGAN WILDHOOD is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado. She is the author of the chapbook Long Division (2017), and her work has been published in The Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at meganwildhood.com.​


​​Bo​wed As If Laden With Snow

Megan Wildhood

Over the course of the eighty-one poems that make up Bowed As If Laden With Snow, Megan Wildhood considers humanity’s climate crisis in parallel with the personal experience of divorce from the perspective of someone who has felt alienated and abandoned by the environmental movement. Still as madly in love with nature as she is with human beings, Wildhood showcases incredible range with heart, humanity, and hope.

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Praise for Bowed As If Laden With Snow

​“Megan Wildhood gives unwavering honor to what falters and dies—and with this, she offers hope in radical accompaniment with whatever may befall us.” 

—Candace Tkachuck, reparational activist and writer

“For Megan Wildhood, life hasn’t gone unnoticed. . . . by her poems I’m not just moved, but transported, transformed.” 

—Don Haggerty, poet and painter


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$21.95 | March 2023 | 96 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-01-1​​

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JENIFER DEBELLIS is the author of Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free…(2021) and Blood Sisters (2018). She edits Pink Panther Magazine and directs the Detroit Writers’ Guild (501c3). Her writing appears in CALYX, Medical Literary Messenger, and elsewhere. She teaches at Saginaw Valley State University.​



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New Wilderness

Jenifer DeBellis

New Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis’s versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain.

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WINNER, Poetry, Independent Author Awards, Literary Global, 2024



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FINALIST, Poetry: General, International Book Awards 2022-2023 

Hoffer Finalist

FINALIST, Eric Hoffer Book Awards 2024


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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for New Wilderness

“Yes, this collection has fortitude and resilience in spades, but DeBellis arrives at these only after meticulously surveying the wreckage that illness makes of good intentions…Not an easy read, New Wilderness, but one that…leaves us with a blueprint for bearing the slings and arrows of any human life.” 

—Iain Haley Pollock, author of Ghost, like a Place

“The real splendor of New Wilderness is in the variety of beautifully crafted poetic forms; poems which themselves are objects of rescue, for they bring order to all the contextual turmoil. I could not put this book of valorous verse down.” 

—Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Capture Theory

“DeBellis’s use of image, humor and irony…allows readers to navigate emotional highs and lows of mental/physical health as a survivor would and, hopefully, understand the unique power of women, of mothers and of poetry.”

—Brad Johnson, author of Smuggling Elephants Through Airport Security

Reviews & Interviews

New Books in Poetry​




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$21.95 | March 2023 | 110 pp 

Paperback | 979-8-986966-31-1

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LINDA NEMEC FOSTER has published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Blue Divide, Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003–2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.



Bone Country

Linda Nemec Foster

Linda Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world—Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville—not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are “the other,” “the foreigner,” the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe. The world as we used to know it. 

Hoffer Finalist

DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE, NYC Big Book Awards 2024

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Praise for Bone Country


“In Bone Country, Linda Nemec Foster’s fractured and melancholic travelogue, the poems (or micro-lyric essays) serve as such luscious and destabilizing portals through which the cities of our world are passed, emerging on the other side slick with luminescence—more amazing, more sad, holy, essential, and strange. ” 

—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

“In Linda Nemec Foster’s Bone Country, each keenly composed and compressed piece seems at once fragmented and yet self-contained. It’s the speed and addictive rhythm with which they reel by that transforms this collection into a visionary travelogue.” 

Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern

Bone Country shimmers with consummate artistry.” 

—Clare MacQueen, editor/curator of MacQueen’s Quinterly

Reviews & Interviews

Verse Daily​Publisher's Weekly​MacQueen's Quinterly

A Little Too QuietNorth of Oxford​​ZYZZYVA​​​

New Books in Poetry​


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$18.95 | March 2023 | 84 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-32-8

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SHARON WHITE is an author, poet, and educator. Her book Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. She is also the author of Boiling Lake (On Voyage), a collection of short fiction, and two poetry collections, Eve & Her Apple and Bone House.




The Body Is Burden and Delight

Sharon White

At the intersection of poetry and prose, Sharon White's The Body Is Burden and Delight examines ecological communities in fragile northern Landscapes, and in the geography of the poet's daily life. Moving from Denmark and Sweden, to Lithuania, Shetland, and Wales, White explores the inner landscape of myth and dreams inspired by a deep connection to the earth, and the beauty and loss inherent in those ecosystems. 

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Praise for The Body Is Burden and Delight

"Sharon White finds a mystical space, the top of the world, where there is snow, a mountain village, icy running water. Then she populates it. . . . This is a book filled with wit and wonder, ‘how,’ White says, ‘the Arctic must be melting, from the bottom up,’ with all that moves under the ice of knowing.” 

Elaine Terranova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter and Dollhouse

The Body Is Burden and Delight is body and all its elements traveling at the speed of light and orienting on the compass of a word—to make every poet jealous, or to generously give us a guide by which to climb the lattice of details and yearning.”

—Peter Money, author of American Drone: New and Select Poems

“You can find yourself anywhere on earth in this book, and the message is the same. The landscape has its own story. This poet takes on the powers of Eve to rewild all of it.”

—Karen Donovan, author of Monad+Monadnock

“Read this book all at once and then linger over White’s icy, wise language line by line. I keep repeating the word ‘wonder’ when I think about her work.”

—Eli Goldblatt, author of For Instance and Wissahickon Creek: Walks & Dreams

“Sharon White invites us to the elemental edges of our world. . . . But in all this entrancing beauty, White doesn’t let us side-step the people who inhabit these spaces so precariously—the women who shoulder responsibility, the boys proud of achievement, the isolated artists, the ghosts.”

​—Nathalie Anderson, author of Stain

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$21.95 | March 2023 | 82 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-79-5

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HEATHER BOURBEAU's work has appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. She is the co-author of Some Days The Bird, a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (2022).



Monarch

Heather Bourbeau

Exploring histories forgotten or often overlooked, Heather Bourbeau's Monarch is a powerful poetic memoir of the American West. Focused on the people and events that shaped California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, Bourbeau crafts a regional history that counteracts the simple narratives we are told and taught. Epic, personal, and compelling, Monarch impacts how we see each other and how we see our shared environment.

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Praise for Monarch

​“Heather Bourbeau chronicles the flotsam of human effort—both destructive and reparative—over the West Coast of the North American continent. She’s convinced me there’s no better way to get history than poetry. I feel close to these figures (both human and nonhuman) that time, greed, hypocrisy, and desperation have stolen from us. Monarch leaves you splashed with feeling and leavened with learning.” 

Lulu Miller, author of Why Fish Don’t Exist and Co-Host of Radiolab

“Such a record, a history of us distilled to a raw violence that comes through the record keeping done by a poet, an artist. . . . It’s such a book of loud screams and silent introspection. Bourbeau has shared with us something of incredible power.” 

Chiwan Choi, author of my name is wolf

“A stunning poetry collection. . . . a dazzling guide to the past that thrums like a beating heart. . . . This book is nec​essary and important, and should be taught in schools.” 

Devi S. Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues and Circa

Reviews & Interviews

National Writing Project Commonwealth Club (San Francisco)

periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics Brooklyn Poets

The Poetry Salon KALW (San Francisco) New Books in Poetry


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$18.95 | March 2023 | 84 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-30-4

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R.B. SIMON is a queer, black visual artist and writer. She is the author of the chapbook, The Good Truth (2021), and her work has been published in multiple journals, as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.​

​​Not Just the Fire

R.B. Simon

In her powerful debut, R.B. Simon confronts subjects that we often dare not talk about in our daily lives, topics we shy away from in our water-cooler conversations. From miscarriage to addiction and overdose, and from bullying and racism to mental illness and eating disorders, nothing is off limits. Ultimately, Not Just the Fire is a story of resiliency. Weaving a narrative of overcoming in a world often harsh and unfair, the narrator returns again and again to the hope of “the blessed new day.”

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Praise for Not Just the Fire

“These poems are gorgeous and necessary and sing the deep truths and lessons of a warrior who has returned with both the wounds and the wisdom of experience.” 

—Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal

"Ultimately, Simon conveys . . . that to make it through the fire and out alive means that anything & everything is possible." 

—Chris Stark, author of Carnival Lights and Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation

“Ultimately, Simon conveys . . . that to make it through the fire and out alive means that anything & everything is possible.”

​—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim​


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$18.95 | September 2022 | 108 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-75-7

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LYNNE VITI is Senior Lecturer Emerita in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She is the author of Dancing at Lake Montebello, Going Too Fast, The Glamorganshire Bible, and Baltimore Girls. She lives in Westwood, Massachusetts.​​



​The Walk to Cefalù

​Lynne Viti

Moving and life-affirming, The Walk to Cefalù moves the reader through the family history that Lynne Viti imagines, embellishes, or even invents out of whole cloth, and into young adulthood and coming of age. Striving for universality, Viti creates a dura​ble sense of a speaker limited by an outside force that she constantly has to find ways around, or through, to contentment and ease. Even when limited by separation or loss, her walk inspires us to reach higher.


WINNER, Miriam Chaikin Poetry Award, Westbeth Artists Housing 2023

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Walk to Cefalù

​“In the very first poem of The Walk to Cefalù, Lynne Viti both recollects her childhood and announces her MO: ‘Beneath each tale, I sensed another/—a truer—story, an alternative text/a painful experience smoothed over.’ Telling that ‘alternative’ story behind the story—the tender elegy beneath the smoothed over surface—‘that’s my job.’ In these engaging, intelligent, and touching poems, Viti fulfills her admirable intentions.” 

Lloyd Schwartz, author of Who’s on First?: New and Selected Poems

“Viti’s poems are beautiful, eloquent, and they speak about a life lived. A life examined. Her memories take us on a journey.” 

Gloria Mindock, author of Ash

“Viti mines rich veins of memory and experience to bring us vivid moments, both recent and past, with the wisdom and grace of a poet who has navigated—and survived—this wild, dangerous, and beautiful world.”

—Matt Hohner, author of Thresholds and Other Poems

“Lynne Viti honors life. . . . This is a book ‘to help us map/the deepest, most human things.’”

—J.D. Scrimgeour, author of Lifting the Turtle​


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$20.95 | September 2022 | 134 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-09-8

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DOKUBO MELFORD GOODHEAD is a Nigerian poet, scholar, and researcher. He received his Ph.D. in English and MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, and is a former professor of interdisciplinary studies at Spelman College. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.​​​




Mourning​

Dokubo Melford Goodhead

Weaving factual and fictional stories about the lives of his loved ones, and those he looks to for strength, Dokubo Melford Goodhead’s Mourning is a meditation on the magnitude of loss. Powerful, raw, and elegiac, Goodhead’s collection is also a commentary on the plight of the Ijaw island people of the oil archipelago of the Niger Delta region of post-colonial Nigeria, where the country gets almost all of its revenue through the mining of oil and gas. Doubling as memoir and poetic exploration, Mourning sets its sights on nothing less than the human soul, and what we must do to protect it.

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Praise for Mourning

​“Dokubo Goodhead’s Mourning is an unflinching examination of loss, grief, and yearning for ancestral roots.” 

Genaro Ky Lý Smith, author of The Land South of the Clouds

“This is a collection of powerful poems about loss and grief. Goodhead’s poems are devastating and striking. And, so, so beautiful.” 

Chika Unigwe, author of On Black Sisters Street


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$21.95 | September 2022 | 172 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-71-9

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MARY CATHERINE HARPER is Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Defiance College in Northwest Ohio. A 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award winner, she was selected as the 2019 Ohio Arts Council Poetry Resident at the Fine Arts Work Center of Cape Cod. She is the author of the chapbook Some Gods Don’t Need Saints, and her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Cold Mountain Review, New England Review, The Spectacle, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Offbeat.

​​The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems

Mary Catherine Harper

In The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems, Mary Catherine Harper collects some of her most personal and poignant poems. With precision and gravity, Harper explores a High Plains family struggling with loss, the cracks and fissures of human love, and the celebration and wonder that are part of the human process of living in and through language. Our inner landscapes, outer des​ires, and complicated triumphs find a home in Harper’s first full-length collection.

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Praise for The Found Object Imagines a Life

“No matter the subject at hand, Harper’s poems serve as revelation and reminder to love fiercely, embrace paradox, and tell stories.”

—Dawn Burns, author of Evangelina Everyday

“This is a collection alive to the world and rich with what it finds there.”

—Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic

“Harper’s voice is authentic, perceptive, and sensitive.”

—Mark B. Hamilton, author of OYO, The Beautiful River

“Readers will discover that the fine line between truth and lying—which the author humbly calls misremembering—is actually masterful creation.”

—Amy Wray Irish, author of Breathing Fire​

Reviews & Interviews

The Crescent-News (OH) FUMFA Poets and Writers Live

Cider Press Review




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$18.95 | September 2022 | 82 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-70-2

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EMILY HOCKADAY has five chapbooks of poetry—Beach Vocabulary, Space on Earth, What We Love and Will Not Give Up, Starting a Life, and Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide—and her work has appeared in the North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, West Wind Review, and Newtown Literary. She lives in Queens.​


​​Naming the Ghost

Emily Hockaday


A woman has both recently become a mother and lost her father, and a ghost has begun haunting this new family. What is the ghost? Why is it here? In poems of the everyday, Emily Hockaday charts a course toward healing in the face of loss, and living in the wake of death. With heartbreak and striking clarity, Naming the Ghost examines grief, physical pain, and the way chronic illness manifests itself in everyday life.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Naming the Ghost

“The poems in this collection haunt and delight. ”

—Jared Harél, author of Go Because I Love You​

​“A powerhouse of small, intense, sometimes brutal, always brilliant poems." 

Jane Yolen, author of Kaddish

“Finding revelation in the mundane, Hockaday’s poems reverberate with the tension—and journey—toward healing.” 

Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse

Reviews & Interviews

Journal Inquirer (Manchester, CT) SPECPO Queens Gazette (NY) 
The Poetry Question Literary Mama New Books in Poetry​​​


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$19.95 | April 2022 | 162 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-06-7

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KATHRYN GAHL is an award-winning writer and poet. She is the author of The Yellow Toothbrush: A Memoir of Trauma and Mercy (2022) and The Velocity of Love (2020). She lives in Eastern Wisconsin.​





Messengers of the Gods: ​New and Selected Poems

Kathryn Gahl

Moving and mysterious, the poems in Messengers of the Gods: New and Selected Poems by Kathryn Gahl have such a nice beat, you can dance to them—even if you have two left feet. Let layers of life draw you in—lovers, fondue, a wafer moon, even bee hives—as Gahl hears the scramble of time and catches each beat. Join her. 

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Messengers of the Gods

Messengers of the Gods is a masterpiece of poetic craft and deeply felt truths, thanks to Kathryn Gahl’s ability to dance with words in an alchemy of form and style.” 

Sylvia Cavanaugh, author of Icarus, Anthropology of Addiction

“Gahl invites us into the house of memory ‘where we inhale pain and exhale love,’ and we hang on her every word. Perhaps we are all just experiencing ‘a brief glory traveling through space and time,’ on this earth. ‘Come dance with me / connect with me,’ Gahl implores, and we do.”

​—Cristina M.R. Norcross, author of The Sound of a Collective Pulse

​“Kathryn Gahl’s Messengers of the Gods journeys through the dance of life. . . . This is an exquisite read, with a masterful use of language, celebrating movement with words.”

—Annette Langlois Grunseth, author of Combat and Campus: Writing Through War

​“Messengers of the Gods is the song we all need to hear right now in this unsettling world to ‘teach our cells new moves,’ as Gahl writes, to become Iris and fly, to hold loves beyond the grave, and, most important, to dream.”

—Jodie Montag, Lakeland University

“Kathryn Gahl’s poems are filled with the sweet but hard liquor of life.” 

Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017–2018, author of Grief Bone

Reviews & Interviews

Midwest Book Review Mistress of the House of Books


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$18.95 | March 2022 | 118 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-03-6

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COLLEEN ALLES is a native Michigander and writer living in West Michigan. Her chapbooks include So What to Say to a Bird, Porch Light to the Longshoreman, and Three Stars. Her first novel, Skinny Vanilla Crisis, was published in 2020.


​After t​he 8-Ball

Colleen Alles

Reply hazy, try again. All the poems in After the 8-Ball want answers, and so have thrown themselves at the mercy of a black plastic 8-Ball ­filled with dark blue alcohol and a tiny twenty-sided die. Love, loss, and Lake Michigan feature prominently in this debut collection from Colleen Alles, who examines everyday life in the Midwest with precision and depth. From the hound asleep in the sun to the pebbles lined up in the sill of a window facing west, these poems stand ready to accept whatever the 8-ball has in store, hoping, always, for, As I see it, yes.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for After the 8-Ball

 After the 8-Ball is a wise and remarkable collection.”

—Linda Nemec Foster, author of The Blue Divide and Talking Diamonds

“Colleen Alles has given readers a true gift: language that adroitly captures what it’s like to be alive in this world, a singular human in a human body, awash in memories, mourning, and the wistful, wondrous loneliness of everyday life.” 

Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy

“Colleen Alles reminds us how difficult it can be to live in the worlds we have made for ourselves. Should everyone read this beautiful book? As I see it, yes.” 

W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

Reviews & Interviews

Ecce Signum



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$18.95 | December 2021 | 102 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-00-5

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DEVON BOHM is a writer, poet, and educator. She holds degrees from Smith College and Fairfield University, and her work has appeared in Labrys, The Graveyard Zine, Necessary Fiction, Spry, and Sixfold. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.






​Careful Cartography

Devon Bohm

Careful Cartography, the striking debut collection from Devon Bohm, doubles as life writing and poetry. With her detailed geographic narrative, Bohm plots out her autobiography through both external and internal landscapes. Strong in style and voice, these impactful free verse poems create a map through wordscapes that equate to topographical locations, a search culminating in the most elusive and unmappable of locations: a home.

Hoffer Finalist

WINNER, Best Publication (Academic Press), Eric Hoffer Awards 2023


Montaigne Medal Winner

SHORTLIST, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Eric Hoffer Awards 2023


Montaigne Medal Winner

WINNER, First Horizon Award, Eric Hoffer Awards 2023


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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu


Praise for Careful Cartography

“This is a life that speaks for many lives.” 

Baron Wormser, author of Legends of the Slow Explosion

“It’s slow work to accept that living is both stone and fruit, but our poet is here to show us just that.” 

Carol Ann Davis, author of The Nail in the Tree

Reviews & Interviews

The Eric Hoffer Award CitationPoetry Spoken Here


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$18.95 | December 2021 | 102 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-69-4

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BARBARA COSTAS-BIGGS is a poet and librarian from Southern Ohio. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Review, Northern Appalachian Review, The Pikeville Review, 8Poems, and others. Her chapbook, The Other Shore, was a finalist for the Washburn Prize from Harbor Review. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and an MLIS from Kent State University.

​Broken On the Wheel

Barbara Costas-Biggs

Drawing on the beauty of the Southern Ohio hills and Northern Appalachia, Barbara Costas- Biggs’s debut poetry collection, Broken On the Wheel, weaves together marriage, motherhood, and memory into a tapestry of creation and reclamation. With bold strokes and striking detail, Biggs mines the messiness of modern life, the reawakenings we strive to experience, and the faith that comes with trying to fix what appears unfixable.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Broken On the Wheel

“Broken On the Wheel is a perceptive, masterful debut.” 

Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Good Bones

“This book is a whole world, one I know and keep close to me, and I can’t imagine a way it could be more complete.” 

Darren C. Demaree, author of a child walks in the dark

“Biggs’s honesty is intense, her attention to detail remarkable.” 

Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate

Reviews & Interviews

Still: The Journal



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$18.95 | December 2021 | 126 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-68-7


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CATHLEEN COHEN was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia.


​​Sparks and Disperses

Cathleen Cohen

The poems in Cathleen Cohen’s Sparks and Disperses reckon with contemporary life through the perspective of visual artists. Drawing on an ancient Kabbalistic myth of the “shattering of vessels,” Cohen explores issues of fracture, healing, and creation; the challenges of poverty, isolation, and the pandemic; and how we can find meaning and joy through artmaking. By building a poetic mural made of cracked ceramics, household items and glass shards, Cohen promotes healing through continuity and hope.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Sparks and Disperses

“These poems gather up the sensuous fruit, the curiosity and grace of the poet’s living.” 

Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Poet Laureate, 2016-2017

“Sparks and Disperses touches reality and, by this actual touching, reveals life in its exquisite brilliance and raw distress.” 

John Fox, The Institute for Poetic Medicine

Reviews & Interviews

Readers' Favorite Poetry Online Radio BookLife Review 

The Reading Bud Midwest Book Review 

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$17.95 | May 2021 | 168 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-66-3

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MARGARET ROZGA a life-long Wisconsin resident and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2019–2020, lives in Milwaukee. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Waukesha, she continues to teach a poetry workshop for Continuing Education at what is now the UW-Milwaukee Waukesha campus.




Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems

Margaret Rozga

In Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems, her fifth volume of poetry, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga brings together some of her best-loved poems about Milwaukee’s fair housing marches and her concern for issues of peace and social justice, with new poems that identify with Alice in Wo​nderland and imagine new Alice adventures. New poems also grapple with issues of recent political turmoil and pandemic-induced uncertainty. These deeply written poems find in language the glue that may hold our selves together.


HONORAB​LE MENTION, Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award, Wisconsin Writers Awards 2021

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

​Praise for Holding My Selves Together

“Rozga’s newest collection is deliciously dizzying, like a lakeside summer at the peak of day. Fiery, hazy, warm, and refuge, these pieces offer a generous scope of Rozga’s voice, views, and celebrations of the everyday.” 

Dasha Kelly Hamilton, 2021-2022 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

“Sorrow, despair, hope, rage, tenacity, faith. It’s all here, as it should be—Rozga’s poetry is an honest grappling with what it takes to fight for a better world.” 

Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Waterbaby

"Margaret Rozga's Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems is a master class in poetry: its movement, its tension, its bafflement, its power. As I read, I found myself speaking lines out loud, for the enjoyment of their brokenness. . . . I will return to Holding My Selves Together to hear these prayers again." 

Jennifer Martelli, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry

Reviews & Interviews

Milwaukee Journ​al Sentinel Highland Park Poetry  

Madison Book Beat

Wisconsin People & Ideas Sundress Publications 

Madison Public Library Arts + Literature Laboratory


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$14.95 | August 2020 | 102 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-62-5


HEATHER DUBROWJohn D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, is the author of Forms and Hollows and two chapbooks. Among the journals where her poetry has appeared are Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. She was director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series from Fall 2009 to Summer 2020.​​


Lost and Found Departments

H​​eather Dubrow

Lost and Found Departments explores the intersections and tensions among many  types of loss and, sometimes, recovery—of words, of people, of memories, of literary genres. Ranging from found poetry and monologues, to reimagined forms and poems of loss and recovery, Heather Dubrow’s collection challenges readers to see beyond the surface of the everyday. With these witty, intelligent, and humane poems, Dubrow encourages us to see and discover the world around us as more than static or mechanistic. To her, the world is poetry.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Lost and Found Departments

"Heather Dubrow’s Lost and Found Departments is a dexterous and quite moving poetry collection. It’s an ode to poetic craft that, within its rich myriad of voices, structures, and forms, revels in Dubrow’s lexical puckishness, incisive sense of humor, and rather notable ability to discover poetry everywhere and in every thing." 

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, National Book Award finalist

"With her keen sense of language’s capacity for pleasure and her puckish wordplay, Dubrow’s observances transform into renovations, each renewal made possible through the very words she uses to record thought. In these pages, lost are the places and person whose perils we grieve, the “back home in back there” never to be recovered; found is Dubrow’s wide, careful heart, made wider in the attempting." 

Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University

Reviews & Interviews

Kenyon Review Battery Journal



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$14.95 | August 2020 | 108 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-63-2

ALFONSO BREZMES was born in Madrid (Spain) in 1966. His first book, La noche tatuada, was a surprising revelation; written at an age when many poets start to retire. Since then he has produced, slowly but surely, the books Don de lenguas, Ultramor, and Sed, all of them with the Spanish publishing house Renacimiento; and Vicios ocultos, with the Argentinian publisher Leviatán. Marginal Notes is the first bilingual anthology of his poetry for an English-speaking readership.



Marginal Notes (Notas Marginales)

Alfonso Brezmes

edited and translated by Eduardo Gregori

Meditative, innovative, and incredibly talented, Spanish poet Alfonso Brezmes departs from tradition to deliver poems that are subtle, elegant, and playfully ironic. He draws upon historical and popular literature to craft poems that both haunt and delight. Brezmes invites readers to experience worlds of love, melancholy, fantasy, and adventure, each ripe with their own symbolism and yearning passion. Translated by Eduardo Gregori, many of Brezmes’s poems are now available in English for the first time. Marginal Notes is an entertaining entry point into modern Spanish poetry, as well as a sterling addition to contemporary world poetry.

To order, please email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu
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$14.95 | August 2019 | 114 pp

Paperback | 978-0-966848-88-5


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CASSONDRA WINDWALKER writes from the southern coast of Alaska, where she is cheered on by a ghost cat, a useless dog, and a tolerant husband. She is the author of two novels, Bury the Lead and Parable of Pronouns. The Almost-Children is her debut book of poetry.​


The Almost-Children

Cassondra Windwalker

Uncovering heartbreak and hope, Cassondra Windwalker takes us on a journey deep into the human heart, set against the backdrop of a beautiful natural world. Her poems are filled with pain and redemption, force and forgiveness, and the responsibility of love. Intense in its imagery, graceful in its style, and keen to the matters of the heart, The Almost-Children will haunt you, heal you, and lift you up. 

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Almost-Children

“With taut, beautiful, and oft-haunting prose, Cassondra Windwalker gives us a book of unforgettable poetry that burrows into your heart and mind in equal measure.” 

Seven Jane, author of The Isle of Gold

“Sad poems for sad times. Windwalker brings her lyrical style to these empathetic poems reminiscent of Rollo May’s The Courage to Create.”

—Jason Dias, author of Finding Life on Mars

The Almost-Children is a flat-out amazing collection. Poems such as “new definitions” and “after the accident” are especially moving when each line is slowly pulled from the page and examined. It’s then that the reader becomes aware of how Windwalker frames these quieter, more intimate moments through deft word choice and subtle flourishes.”

—Alcy Leyva, author of And Then There Were Crows​

The Almost-Children is filled with raw emotion, eloquently expressed through Ms. Windwalker’s poetic style. The images evoked by these poems will stay with me for years to come.” 

Lanie Goodell, author of Salvagium




$14.95 | December 2016 | 96 pp

Paperback | 978-0-966848-83-0

Inspired by Entropy": An Interview with Kristine Ong Muslim - SmokeLong  Quarterly

KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland area in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao.​​​​

Meditations of a Beast

Kristine Ong Muslim


"Kristine Ong Muslim is a fearless writer who pushes us to the edge of an abyss and asks us to jump. Meditations of a Beast is a dark, wild, ruthless collection that offers glimpses of worlds and futures beyond our own. Each poem leaves a bruise. Each verse slips right into your ear—eel-like—and never leaves. We are witnessing the rise of a truly singular voice in speculative fiction and poetry."  

 Adam Morgan, Chicago Review of Books



Selected as one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2016" by the Chicago Review of Books


To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu




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Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$23.95 | March ​​​2024 | 156 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-77-6

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MICHAEL MARTONE is the author of over twenty books. He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and now lives below the Bug Line in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Table Talk & Second Thoughts is his second memoir, following Michael Martone (2005).

Table Talk & Second Thoughts

​​Michael Martone

With wit and humor, Michael Martone writes his life as one of brief bites, effervescent episodes, and meaningful meals illuminated by the luminaries on the other side of the table. In many ways Martone’s annotations of a life lived with words and writers, Table Talk & Second Thoughts surges with poignancy while recalling the little moments that make us human.

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​​Praise for Table Talk & Second Thoughts

“This is the name-dropping-est memoir I’ve ever read. . . . Martone is one of the few writers who was born in Indiana, writes about Indiana, and eats in Indiana, but meanwhile, he seems to have been everywhere else, too, meeting all the best writers.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist

“Outside, the snow may be falling, and on the streets, among strangers, there may be only that clipped, cold briskness, but Martone is here, he’s from Indiana, and he warms you; he makes you laugh. He makes you feel you belong.”

—Rilla Askew, American Book Award Winner

“How does anyone curate and name mythology? What constitutes history to Michael Martone? Is anything true?”

—Robert Stapelton, editor of Booth

“This Michael, this Martone, this Michael Martone.”

—Stewart O'Nan, author of Ocean State
​​Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$29.95 | March ​​​2024 | 280 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-75-2

​Dr. Donald E. Quist is author of two essay collections, Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist, and To Those Bounded. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at University of Missouri. Find him at donaldquist.com and @donaldewquist.

Kali White VanBaale is the author of the novels The Monsters We Make, The Good Divide, and The Space Between. Kali is a core faculty member of the Lindenwood University MFA Creative Writing Program, where she was named Adjunct Professor of the Year in 2022. Find her at kaliwhite.com and @kaliwriting.

Bailey Gaylin Moore is a Ph.D. candidate studying Creative Writing at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Her debut essay collection, Thank You for Staying with Me, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2025. Find her at baileygaylinmoore.com and @baileygaylin.

​​
​The Past Ten: An Anthology

edited by 

Donald Quist, Kali White VanBaale, and Bayley Gaylin Moore

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​​Praise for The Past Ten

"A reflective mosaic, made up of some of the most exciting voices in American literature today.”

—Jaquira Diaz

“The 71 essays in The Past Ten may be ‘fun-sized’ (1,000 words max) but boy, do they pack a wallop. Heartbreaking and heartmending, even the most harrowing of them full of hope.”

—David Jauss

“The many memoirists assembled here create compelling codas, artificial endings, closing parentheses in order to look back and look closely, sift and sort, assess and assay with gifted elan and elegant exegesis, and see for the very first time these very mean and memorable meanings.”

—Michael Martone

“What a powerful and brimming treasure trove of stories this is: stories of transformation, of metamorphosis, of loss, of love, and of becoming. A persuasive and ingenious ode to time: its waves and meanders, its sharp curves and gentle arms.”

—Robin Marie MacArthur


Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$24.95 | September ​​​2024 | 230 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-50-9

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SCOTT RUSSELL MORRIS is a writer and enthusiast. He’s a mixed-media artist, a zinester, and a foodie. He owns a home in Texas and lives in South Korea, where he is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Utah Asia Campus. He is the creator and editor of Magpie Zines. 


Points of Tangency

​​Scott Russell Morris

Within the pages of Points of Tangency, a sequence of brilliant personal essays, Scott Russell Morris, a closeted queer Mormon, tells the story of meeting and then marrying his now wife. His story, told with grace, compassion, and dexterity, forges the framework of a life lived, and lives living together, in our mysterious and dynamic present. 

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Praise for Points of Tangency​​

“Fresh,  surprising . . . wryly humorous.”  

—Sheryl St. Germain, author of 50 Miles

​“Big hearted and quietly humorous. This book is a gift.” 

—Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie

“Part travel writing, part memoir, part experimental lyric, the writing captures exquisite details of a life rich with experience.”  

—Patricia Colleen Murphy, author of Bully Love

“Morris’s essays move the way our innermost thoughts do, with a catchy sense of discovery, recovery, and delight.” 

—Eric Lemay, author of Remember Me

“I worried the notion of worrying as I read this prose rosary, this secular chaplet, amazed by Morris’s prowess to manipulate the multitude of points he held in his hand.”

—Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

“Morris has the skill to take his readers . . . into the recesses of his heart and experiences.”  

—Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses​


​​Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$24.95 | August ​​​2024 | 184 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-49-3

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CASEY KNOTT is the author of Ground Work (2018), a poetry collection, and the poetry editor for The Wax Paper. Her work has appeared in Gulf Stream, Prism Review, Cold Mountain Review, The New Territory, Cimarron Review, Sugar House Review, and others. She lives on an urban farm in Des Moines, Iowa.

This Season, The Next

​​Casey Knott

Part DIY, part memoir, part musing, This Season, The Next finds Casey Knott at several intersections: starting over after a divorce, meeting the love of her life, blending a family, and finding and remodeling an urban farm complete with chickens and a much beloved pet turkey. Whittling down her failures, Knott discovers that refining, renewal, and patience are at the root of not just gardening, but caring for chickens, creating a new family, and remodeling a home. There are no certainties with any of these endeavors—such is life—but Knott reminds us that we can still choose joy because and in spite of that, and that every season gives way to the next.

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Praise for This Season, The Next

​“A luminous, lyrical memoir.”

—Thomas Maltman, author of The Land and Little Wolves

“This is a story that can only be told after the making that is a re-making, after risk, years and years after facts one cannot see clearly without distance from them, hope in Knott’s Iowa a thing with feathers, yes, but bloodied ones.”

—Matt Mauch, author of A Northern Spring

“Casey Knott doesn’t just mend her broken American families, she reconfigures them as a hectic array in sunstruck stained glass.”

—John Domini, author of The Archeology of a Good Ragù

“Anyone—everyone—who’s had to find their way in the world will relish this tale of seeking out and building a home, seed by seed, feather by feather, and tile by tile.”

—Gwen Hart, author of Never Be the Same

“Casey Knott’s story and her grace with language give us a lot to think about, a lot to remember. ”

—Nick Healy, author of It Takes You Over

Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$27.95 | August ​​​2024 | 264 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-51-6

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PHILLIP STERLING is a poet and fiction writer. His books include Mutual Shores (2000), In Which Brief Stories Are Told (2011), Amateur Husbandry (2019), and Local Congregation (2023). He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, two Senior Fulbright Lectureships (Belgium and Poland), a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and artist residencies at Isle Royale National Park and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. He lives in Lowell, Michigan.

Lessons in Geography

​​Phillip Sterling

Written and published over a period of forty years, the essays in Phillip Sterling’s Lessons in Geography chronicle how his formative years in Northwest Lower Michigan not only inspired him to be a writer but also profoundly influenced his creative and critical perspectives. Diverse in form, the essays are nonetheless unified in theme: how the geography of a place—the forests, shores, and lakes of Michigan—plays a role in one’s education, imparting knowledge of the wider, human world.  

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Praise for Lessons in Geography

“Like earlier Michigan poet/essayists such as Theodore Roethke and Jim Harrison, Sterling, in these lovely essays, explores both the external and interior dichotomies of settled/unsettled and domestic/wild. . . . a book about a poet’s sometimes perilous coming of age, and of aging with grace and acceptance.”

—Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs

“Sterling brings wide-ranging insight, an in-depth sense of history, self-effacing wisdom, and the marvelous double vision of the true memoirist to these essays.”

—Anne-Marie Oomen, Michigan Author Award Winner, author of The Long Fields

“Mixes keenly observed experiences with fresh perspectives, all rendered with a poet’s sensitive precision.”

—​Nan Sanders Pokerwinski, author of Mango Rash


Reviews, Interviews, & Media
The Mining Journal Peter White Public Library 


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$32.95 | October ​2024 | 318 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-15-8

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NEIL F. PAYNE is a Certified Wildlife Biologist and Professor Emeritus of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He worked as a wildlife biologist for the Newfoundland and Labrador Wildlife Service (1967–71) and as a wildlife professor for the University of Washington in Seattle (1973–75) and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (1975–98). He lives part-time in Florida, in Newfoundland and Labrador, and on the shore of the Wisconsin River in Wisconsin.​​



Wildlifer

​​Neil F. Payne

Neil F. Payne has spent nearly his entire adult life working as a “wildlifer” throughout North America. With several books, articles, and research studies to his credit, Payne closes his estimable career by guiding readers through an analysis of wildlife management as a profession. From the influence of Aldo Leopold and John Muir, to wildlife education, habitat diversity, and the value of conservation, Payne provides an exhaustive study of not only a profession, but also a way of life, and how it must be preserved.​

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Praise for Wildlifer

“Neil F. Payne has lived an exceptional life. He honorably served his country as a Marine in Vietnam, raised a loving family, and has made and continues to make a substantial contribution to the singularly important profession of wildlife management. This book will undoubtedly help the reader better understand why the wildlife profession, biodiversity and ecosystem management, environmental education, leadership, and relationships are key to guiding society for generations to come.”

—Adam N. Payne, Former Secretary, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

“Marvelous writing—and exciting coverage over many years.”

—Estella Leopold, Professor Emerita of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle​​​


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$24.95 | April ​2024 | 230 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-40-0


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Kay Oakes Oring was born in Plum City, Wisconsin. Her early years were spent on farms of grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  Although her family moved to Moscow, ID, there were many trips back and forth.

Kay has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her professional life was in dietetics and education. She was the Director of Dietetics Education at the University of North Dakota and then professor/medical educator in the Department of Family Medicine, University of Nevada School of Medicine, Reno. 

She now lives near Susanville, CA, with her husband.  She has a daughter and two granddaughters.​


We Come from Good Stock

Kay Oakes Oring

West Central Wisconsin, 1853. As soon as the ice goes out on the St. Croix River, Mildred Potter's boarding house fills with lumberjacks bringing logs down river to the mill. In the spring, one lumberjack, Levi Jefferson Oakes, notices Mildred's sister Mary and lingers after supper to talk to her. So begins We Come from Good Stock, Kay Oakes Oring's history of family, frontier, and fortitude carved out of the rugged beauty of rural Wisconsin. From marriage and children, to prosperity, loss, and reclamation, the Oakes clan represents the peril and promise of staking a claim, starting a family, and watching the things you build become eternal.  

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Praise for We Come from Good Stock
 

“The stories . . . give color and life to the history of settlement, logging, and farming in the early days of Wisconsin's statehood."

—Margaret Liddiard, author of Tilting to Listen

“Reveals the spirit of a people who with love and perseverance prevail, the love of the land in their blood, their hearts bound with strength's beneficence. A must read."

—Dianna M. Henning, author of Camaraderie of the Marvelous

“An exceptional and loving tribute to a pioneer Wisconsin family. It is a treasure not only for the Oakes family in New Richmond, but for the state of Wisconsin, and for anyone wishing to relate to the humor and heartaches of life long ago."   

—Robert L. Owens, author of Pointman 

“At its heart, these stories are about people dreaming of, searching for, and creating new homes in a new land. This moving book inspires us to explore the stories found in our own family trees, wherever we are from."

  —Joelle Frazer, author of The Territory of Men


Reviews, Interviews, & Media
Lassen County Times 
Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$32.95 | January ​2024 | 304 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-25-7

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ROBERT ROOT is the author of several narratives of history and place, including Walking Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth (2017), Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now (2009), and Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale (2003), and the essay collection Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place (2012). He has published and presented widely on creative nonfiction. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin.​



The Arc of the Escarpment

Robert Root

The rocks of the Niagara Escarpment were formed in the middle of the Silurian Period (c. 443 to c. 412 million years ago) and were exposed during periods of glaciation that prevented and removed subsequent geologic depositions as recently as 11,000 years ago in the northern Midwest. The Arc of the Escarpment invites us to discover nearly hidden evidence of the Escarpment, ascend to cliff tops, descend to the base of cliffs, crawl into sinkhole-formed caverns, walk the woodlands that surround the cliffs, learn the changes that industry and commerce made to the landscape, and discover the sites that ecologists and conservationists have explored and preserved. With great detail and a sincere dedication to place, Robert Root encourages us to pay attention to the land beneath our feet, appreciate its changes, and value its preservation as we travel back through time and appreciate the scale of the history of the landscape around us.

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Praise for The Arc of the Escarpment
 
“Root might be looking for what defines him and his home, but he offers us even more: the reminder that when we know more about not just who and where we are but also when we are, we can begin to wrestle with the fallacy of arbitrary boundaries and to understand—deeply—the value of humility.” 

—Barbara Hurd, author of The Epilogues
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“Root enriches these stories of stone and scalloped shorelines with research, revealing a stunning breadth of history held in shapes that glaciers made.”

—Christine Stewart-Nuñez, author of Chrysopoeia: Essays of Language, Love, and Place

“Root brings to bear a wealth of detail and insights that traverse time and ecological thought.”

​—Leslie Carol Roberts, author of The Entire Earth and Sky
Wildlifer_Cover.jpg$28.95 | January ​2024 | 288 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-33-2

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YOLANDA DELOACH is an avid section hiker and outdoors advocate. She became a "1,000 miler" on the Ice Age Trail in 2021.​

Squatter

One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Spirit on the Ice Age Trail

​​​Yolanda DeLoach

I’m emotionally not in a good place. So begins Yolanda DeLoach’s raw and redemptive Squatter, a tale of trails, trekking, and overcoming trauma. Between heartache and the realization that a relationship was never as it seemed, DeLoach pushes herself toward Wisconsin’s historic Ice Age Trail, a place of friendship and, ultimately, forgiveness. But the forgiving starts from within, as she makes her way, section by section, along the trail’s storied footways. Honest, heartfelt, and told with a survivor’s grace, Squatter inspires, encourages, and listens, like a good friend on the trail.
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FINALIST, Autobiography/Memoir, Storytrade Book Awards 2024


Praise for Squatter
 

“Yolanda DeLoach shows us what trail magic is all about. ”

—Patty Dreier, Past President, Ice Age Trail Alliance

“Many people use long-distance hiking—whether intentionally or subconsciously—as a way to heal. That includes Yolanda DeLoach, whose memoir about her trek along the Ice Age Trail beautifully showcases both the wonders of this National Scenic Trai​l and how therapeutic hiking can be.”

—Melanie Radzicki McManus, author of Thousand-Miler: Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail

​“A courageous story. Yolanda’s vivid descriptions of the Ice Age Trail’s beauty, obstacles, and emancipation brought back wonderful memories of my own hike. Yolanda also weaves a challenging emotional journey into the narrative with raw honesty. Successful memoir writing is not about what you did, it’s about what you did with it.”

—Ed Abell, author of My Father’s Keep

Reviews & Interviews

Hudson Star-Observer  Milwaukee Magazine  Door County Pulse 

Lodi Enterprise / Poynette Press​​​​St. Paul Pioneer Press Fox Cities Magazine ​



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$22.95 | December ​2023 | 154 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-24-0

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DAVE GRESCHNER is an an award-winning outdoor writer and columnist. He served as the sports/outdoors editor at the Rice Lake Chronotype in northwest Wisconsin for over forty years, where he won twenty Wisconsin Newspaper Association first-place awards. Soul of the Outdoors​ is his first book.​



Soul of the Outdoors

​Dave Greschner

It takes years to learn the art of seeing, of expecting to see nature’s gifts. In Soul of the Outdoors, Dave Greschner passes that art along. He tells how little that chickadee at the feeder weighs, how tree buds survive in winter, how far a fisher leaps, and what the six blobs of shadows are on the creek bed below a water strider. He traces the cycle of seasons, immersing us in spring hikes to the marshes of emerging frogs and returning birds, summer’s coolness along the trout stream, a forgotten apple tree in autumn, and a full moon snowshoe hike in winter. With humor and heart, Soul of the Outdoors treks along the trails of one’s outdoor adventures and, ultimately, the trails of our lives.​

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Praise for Soul of the Outdoors

​“Greschner writes of the world in the way I wish to see it: with knowledge, authenticity, and reverence most of all.” 

—B.J. Hollars, author of Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds

Soul of the Outdoors is part field guide, part almanac. Whether we join Dave Greschner while he’s road hunting for firewood or cradling a saw whet owl on his snowshoe trail, we’re right there with him every step of the way: from watching mulberry-tinged sunsets to discovering the first horned lark in the melt of winter.”

—Patti See, author of Here on Lake Hallie

​“Dave Greschner writes prose with lyrical poetry, helping the reader reconnect with the simple joys of childhood—times of playing outside until dark, exploring the natural world, letting that world be our first and best teacher.”

—Timothy Goodwin, author of Within These Woods

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$28.95 | September ​2023 | 268 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-14-1

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JOHN HARMON is a widely commissioned composer. He created the jazz studies program at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later founded and led the award-winning jazz nonet Matrix, which toured the country for nearly six years. Harmon serves as Composer-in-Residence for the Red Lodge Music Festival, artistic director for Fox Jazz Fest, and in 2005, was named a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. He holds honorary doctorates from Lawrence University and Ripon College.​​​



From the Heart: The Story of Matrix

John Harmon

In 1974, nine musicians came together in Appleton, Wisconsin, to form Matrix, a jazz fusion ensemble. Led by composer and keyboardist John Harmon, the group rose to prominence on the festival circuit before recording six acclaimed albums. Follow Harmon as he tells the story of the band, from their beginnings in the Midwest to their greatest successes to their reunion tours that brought them back together. From the Heart brings you into the inner workings of a highly influential music group, as well as closer to the man who made it all happen.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for From the Heart: The Story of Matrix​​

“When I first heard Matrix, I freaked! These guys were real musicians playing incredibly intelligent compositions. I became their biggest fan!”

—Bobby Shew, world famous trumpet player/recording artist 

​"The band was carried by the remarkable camaraderie of its members and crew. But John, who I still call 'Chief,' from those days, was the rock of the whole operation. Every member had his own role, but Matrix was his baby. ​No John Harmon, no Matrix. A high point in all of our lives. Hail to the Chief."

—Kurt Dietrich ("Dietch"), trombone, author of Wisconsin Riffs: Jazz Profiles from the Heartland

"Know this though, whatever goodness Matrix possessed was borne of the seeds of John Harmon’s honesty, humility, and the uncompromising musical vision he planted in each of us."

—John Kirchberger ("Kirch"), saxophones

"Matrix was a gift. The diversity of our music determined the variety of our experiences. I will always look back on my Matrix days with fondness and gratitude to all our band members."

—Mike Hale ("Tex"), trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion

"It was a place in time that provided a space for us to express our love of music and present it in an honest way. We learned from each other, supported each other, and aspired to be better players as we tackled some of the most difficult ensemble playing I had ever encountered."

—Larry Darling ("Zap"), trumpet, flugelhorn, synthesizer

“Matrix spoke with a voice filled with joy, energy, and originality that captivated music lovers and critics alike. Together, they shared and achieved the same vision. They created the legacy of Matrix: one of excellence, invention, and collaboration." 

—Mindy Cibrario, Appleton, Wisconsin



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$24.95 | August ​2023 | 228 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-99-8


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ANNE-MARIE OOMEN is the author of As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book, which won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award and a Michigan Notable Book Award. Her other titles include The Lake Michigan Mermaid; Love, Sex and 4-H; Pulling Down the Barn; and House of Fields (all Michigan Notable Books).​



​​​
The Long Fields

​Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen’s sixth essay collection, The Long Fields, celebrates rural life as she experienced it growing up on a farm and then into an adulthood marked by both wandering and homing. The three parts cover three phases of the author’s life: moments of early farm life in “Childhood’s Lamplight,” building her own home (complete with Estwing hammer) in “The Heart of Place,” and finally “Kuieren” (Dutch for “amble”) which delves into the wide swath of daily life. These three parts build a world that offers the vitality of living country. At its heart, The Long Fields voices the best of Midwestern rural living: a relationship to land, stewarding a place, and honoring the sacred quotidian.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu


Praise for The Long Fields

“Oomen’s words and stories walk us through Michigan’s seasons, our relationship with the land, and how this place defines us.” 

—Jacob Wheeler, author of Angel of the Garbage Dump 

“Anne-Marie Oomen’s glorious essays will give you something intensely personal: the necessary tension of a writer as she steps back, pushes against the beloved soil that nurtured her, but can’t completely leave it behind.” 

—Fleda Brown, author of Mortality, With Friends 

“Anne-Marie Oomen takes us beautifully and startlingly up close to the details of life, and then transports us to places sometimes wonderful and sometimes dark in our own hearts and minds and worlds.” 

—Jeff Smith, author of Becoming Amish

“This book is stunning. With its compassion, reflection, and celebration, Anne-Marie Oomen’s The Long Fields offers us a balm for our too-often battered hearts.” 

​—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults and Temple of Air



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$24.95 | August ​2023 | 178 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-04-2

ERIK MORTENSON is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and faculty member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. 

CHRISTOPHER KRAMER (Christopher of Detroit) is the author of three novels and two poetry books with mystical themes. His latest novel, Dominique’s Confession, dives deep into the occult underbelly of Detroit during the Roaring Twenties. 

​​​
​Kick Out the Bottom

Erik Mortenson & Christopher Kramer

Amidst the ruins of Detroit, two seekers question all that they thought they knew as they struggle to achieve spiritual awakening in this collaborative memoir. Guided by Ryan, an eccentric mystic from the suburbs, the pair explore a ramshackle city while running experiments on themselves in a bid for understanding who they are and what life means. But as the questions Ryan poses deepen, the two are left wondering what happens when you truly “kic​​k out the bottom.”

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Kick Out the Bottom

“Yes, ‘kick out the jams’ was one generation’s provocation, but Mortenson and Kramer inhabited in their youth a heady mixture of punkish aesthetics and neo-hip mysticism. They give us a Detroit that was on the edge of massive re-transformation even as they were themselves on their way to new modes of living.” 

—Aldon Lynn Nielsen, The Pennsylvania State University

“In Rilkean fashion, Kick Out the Bottom explores characters who are willing to change their lives as they endure an archetypal search for meaning.” 

—Daniel Morris, Purdue University, editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900

Kick Out the Bottom is the future of literature, or, to appropriate from the Detroit that the book transcends, we may ask, ‘Is there a Kick Out the Bottom in your future?’” 

—Stephen Paul Miller, St. John’s University, author of Being with a Bullet


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$28.95 | December 2022 | 294 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-78-8

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JEFF WILSON currently spends his time between his island cabin on the Turtle Flambeau Flowage and Lake Superior, adventuring with his wife, artist and illustrator, Terry Daulton. Wrong Tree: Adventures in Wildlife Biology is his first full-length book.  

TERRY DAULTON is an environmental educator and artist. She works in scratchboard, watercolor, pastels, and printmaking. Her artwork can be viewed at terrrydaultonart.com. ​

​Wrong Tree: Adventures in Wildlife Biology

Jeff Wilson, with illustrations by Terry Daulton

During his ​30+ year career as a wildlife technician for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Jeff Wilson learned to be at home in an eagle nest at the top of a white pine, tracking furbearers on snow covered forest roads, and spending nights under the stars banding loons. Jeff’s adventures (or misadventures) in wildlife biology, are incredibly informative, entertaining, occasionally hilarious, and passionate in the concern for the wildlife of the Midwest, North America, and the future.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Wrong Tree

“Jeff’s wild and often amusing lifestyle, captured in this book, shows that he is the last of a breed. But our movement, environmentalism, is not dying and Jeff offers a beacon for the next generation to preserve its ties to the land.” 

Rocky Barker, Pulitzer Finalist & author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America

“An illuminating and entertaining journey of inquiry into the wonders of nature.” 

Tia Nelson, environmentalist and daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson

"Here is a well-written story of love for the outdoors and especially its wildlife.” 

Jerry Apps, author of Whispers and Shadows, A Naturalist'​s Memoir

“Jeff Wilson…is a world class individual and has more stories than anyone I have ever met.” 

Jim Paruk, author of Loon Lessons

Reviews & Interviews

The Larry Meiller Show (WPR) ​Outdoors Radio with Dan Small 

The Lake Guy  

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$24.95 | November 2022 | 240 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-74-0

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JIM LANDWEHR is the author of three previous memoirs: Cretin Boy, Dirty Shirt, and The Portland House. His nonfiction has been published in Main Street Rag, The Sun Magazine, Story News, Portage Magazine, and Wisconsin Outdoor News.. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin.​  


​At the Lake

Jim Landwehr

One year when asked around the campfire what their favorite vacation memories were, Jim Landwehr’s kids replied, “trips to the cabin.” In At the Lake, stories of fishing and kayaking, a single mother and growing teenagers, and parents wanting what’s best for their children weave a larger tale of the cabin experience in the Upper Midwest. Despite the changing settings and cast of characters, the principles of rest, relaxation, and renewal remain central to three generations of a Midwestern family. With fifteen rich personal histories, Landwehr delivers a memoir filled with humor, warmth, and reverence for life up North.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Chosen as the #1 Best New Lake Book of 2023 (Book Authority)

Praise for At the Lake

“In good times and in grief, Landwehr reminds us, the small moments we spend in nature with those we love are sacred.” 

Kim Suhr, author of Nothing to Lose

“Landwehr’s memoir is a heartwarming collage of personal yet universal memories.” 

Patricia Skalka, author of the Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries

“Jim Landwehr’s At The Lake takes us on a journey of Northwoods adventures.” 

Jeff Nania, author of the Northern Lakes Mystery Series

Reviews & Interviews

KFAN 100.3  Lakeland Times  Twin Cities Pioneer Press​​​​​


$21.95 | April 2022 | 94 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-08-1

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TAKWA GORDON is a Somali-American writer, editor, and social worker. She holds an MA in English and minors in comparative literature and literacy. She enjoys painting, running, reading, and kayaking. She currently lives in Ogden, Utah with her family. ​

Bod​​y Talk

Takwa Gordon

Blending poetry and nonfiction prose into a hybrid memoir brimming with humanity, Takwa Gordon’s Body Talk explores being bipolar, Black, a refugee, a woman, a Muslim, a child sexual abuse survivor, and a first-generation college student in America. At once a narrative of trauma and disruption, Gordon also investigates the power of love and community, and ultimately what healing looks like for a Black-American trying to carve out a story, and a future, of her own.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Body Talk

“An artistic, poignant portrait of vulnerability, self love, and survival.” 

Aitch Alexandar, author of My Body is a Junkyard

“Takwa Gordon’s Body Talk is at once an unflinching study of abuse and trauma, an illuminating meditation on the impact of racism and religious bigotry, and an uplifting chronicle of recovery and empowerment.” 

Vince Font, Glass Spider Publishing

“Anyone who has experienced armed conflicts in Africa or elsewhere may benefit from reading this memoir.” 

Mohamed Haji Ingiriis, author of The Suicidal State in Somalia




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$32.95 | April 2022 | 366 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-02-9

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CAROLYN DALLMANN grew up on a family farm within the village limits of North Freedom, Wisconsin. Prior to writing fulltime she worked at the Badger Army Ammunition Plant in Sauk County, Wisconsin, for over thirty years. Her life writing has appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, and North Freedom is her debut book.​

North Freedom

Carolyn Dallmann

With the clarity of sharp memory and the innocence of youthful charm, Carolyn Dallmann takes readers on a nostalgic journey through family, farming, and growing up in North Freedom. Dozens of interrelated stories weave a narrative of promise and hard work, built on the backs of three generations of Wisconsin farmers within a thriving, small town community in the 1950s and 1960s. Dallmann’s raw, immediate style illuminates the past and reminds us of the vision and vitality of remembrance.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for North Freedom

“Carolyn Dallmann captures the innocence of a little girl growing up on a farm in a small rural Wisconsin community.”

Keri Olson, author of Find Your Heart, Follow Your Heart

“The rural charm and humor of these reminiscences is delightful. Wonderful family photos add to this portrait of mid-20th-century rural Wisconsin.” 

Marc Seals, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Baraboo Sauk County




$21.95 | April 2022 | 172 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-07-4

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MARTHA LUNDIN is a writer and educator living in Minnesota. They completed their MFA in nonfiction at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.​ Martha’s work can be found in Fourth Genre, Newfound, Gertrude Press, Ninth Letter, and Shenandoah Literary Journal, among others.​


​​The In-Between State

Martha Lundin

The essays in The In-Between State forward a compassionate analysis of bodies: queer bodies, bodies of water, bodies that are hated, and bodies that deserve love. Martha Lundin, in fifteen moving, finely-crafted essays, attempts to understand the ways in which people try to shape landscapes—how this can be a violent act, even as it seeks to be loving in some ways, and that this violence is not so different from the ways in which queer people shape their bodies to fit in or live outside of a norm. With essays both personal and progressive, The In-Between State forms a love letter to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, ultimately, a love letter to Lundin’s queer body and queer bodies across the United States.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The In-Between State

“Rendered in crisp and sumptuous prose, and grappling toward transcendence, Lundin’s work uncovers the beautiful ‘outliers’ lurking amid the ornaments of our world. And in doing so, these essays levitate and whirl, as if miracles.” 

Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

“This collection marks the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American literature.” 

May-lee Chai, American Book Award winner, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants




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$18.95 | April 2021 | 130 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-65-6

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ROBERT MILTNER is the award-winning author of two books of prose poetry, Hotel Utopia and Orpheus & Echo, and a short story collection, And Your Bird Can Sing. A professor emeritus of English at Kent State University Stark and the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing, Miltner lives in Northeast Ohio.​


Ohio Apertures

Robert Miltner

The inaugural volume in our "Back Home" series, Robert Miltner's Ohio Apertures is a collection of brief pieces of creative nonfiction that turns its attention to northeast Ohio's position as both a Great Lakes state and the north coast of America. Its dozen selections, which include flash memoir, lyric essays, narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, travel writing, and historical excavations of place, trace the author's life from early childhood onward, offering a template for understanding the impact of place, region, family, literacy, and cultural influence on the shaping of a Midwest identity.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Ohio Apertures

“Miltner’s essays and reflections grant dignity to the commonplace.” 

David Giffels, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt

“Ohio Apertures represents storytelling at its lyric best.” 

Barbara Sabol, Solitary Spin 

Reviews & Interviews

​​Rust Belt Girl Th​e Boom Project River Teeth

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Front Jacket.png$12.99 | April 2019 | 272 pp

Paperback | 978-0-984673-96-4


The Wisconsin Idea

Charles McCarthy​​​

Edited by Ross K. Tangedal and Jeff Snowbarger

Charles McCarthy’s The Wisconsin Idea, originally published in 1912, made the phrase “the Wisconsin idea” famous throughout the state and the country. Grounded in thorough research, meticulous detail, and a steadfast belief in the public good, the book is an important historical document of the state of Wisconsin, the Midwest, and the United States. McCarthy’s chronicle of progressive state craft in practice charges those in government to invest in “hope, health, happiness, and justice,” in order to build up, rather than exploit, the resources (both human and natural) of the country, that we may truly prosper as a free people.

This new edition, with informative annotations for contemporary readers, is a must read for scholars and students of progressivism at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as a must own for those who believe in the power and responsibility of the Wisconsin Idea.

To order directly from the press, please email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Review

Middle West Review

The J. Baird ​Callicott Environmental Humanities Series

Named for famed environmental ethics scholar J. Baird Callicott, this series is designed to provide scholars the opportunity to reflect on environmental issues as they relate to the scholar’s academic area of specialization. *Currently suspended

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$14.95 | August 2019 | 206 pp

Paperback | 978-0-977480-26-5


Stranger, Creature, Thing, Other

Clint Jones

Clint Jones delves into the problematic nature of human Being by examining how we created the climate crisis and what it will take to change they nature of ourselves to save the natural world. Using the motif of monstrosity, Jones examines consumption, domination, historical inheritances, alienation, and competing social epistemologies to provide a richer understanding of the human element in nature and develop a new philosophical paradigm: ecostentialism.

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu




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$9.99 | August 2018 | 128 pp

Paperback | 978-0-984673-95-7


​Ecological Reflections on Post-Capitalist Society

Clint Jones

Ecological Reflections provides an intellectual roadmap for deciphering the difficulties facing civilization confronted by the destabilization of late stage capitalism. Drawing upon a variety of resources, Dr. Clint Jones argues that it is of vital importance that traditional ideas about the human-nature divide be systematically broken down, not merely along the typical socio-political divides of race, class, and gender, but at deeper ontological and metaphysical levels.


To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Review

​North Meridian Review 

Select ​Backlist Titles   


Among the Leaves: A Collection of Outdoor Essays

George Rogers​
Publication Date:  2012

From fish to deer, places to people, and everywhere in between, George Rogers captures the essence of Wisconsin’s wildlife and history in Among the Leaves. “What happened to THE State Park?” and “where have all the passenger pigeons gone?” are some of the questions answered in this captivating description of what the outdoors has to offer, both in Wisconsin and beyond. As a writer for the Stevens Point Journal and the Portage County Gazette, Rogers wrote an expertly crafted, widely read outdoor living column.


Syncopation

Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
Publication Date:  2012

In nineteenth-century France, a woman’s role was explicitly defined: she was a daughter, then a wife, then a mother. This view was held by novelist and poet Victor Hugo, but not by his daughter, pianist and poet Adèle Hugo. Under such constraints, what’s a woman of passion to do? Syncopation, by Elizabeth Felt, breathes life into the unconventional thoughts of this controversial female figure. An elderly Adèle recounts her desperate attempts to gain personal freedom. Her memoir blurs the fine line between truth and madness, in a narrative that is off-kilter, skewed,…syncopated.

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Whipped, Not Beaten

Melissa Westemeier
Publicaton Date:  2011

Sadie Davis is craving change. Recently dumped and working for a boss she despises, she is determined to shake up her life as a single woman in the city of Madison. She takes a side job as a home party consultant selling kitchenware, hoping that it will be the spice that turns her life around. Through failed recipes and cold ovens, Sadie works to create something that’s a bit sweeter, a lot richer, and oh, so very delicious.

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Fugitive from Spanish Fascism: A Memoir by Miguel Domínguez Soler

Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Barker
Publication Date:  2010

Miguel based his memoir on the diaries he kept his entire life, including the dangerous years when he was a fugitive. His account of the Fascist repression is a valuable addition to recent works on the suppressed history of the atrocities committed during the Spanish civil war that brought General Francisco Franco to power.
 

Wisconsin River of Grace

Kyle L. White
Publication Date:  2009

Ghosts and kielbasa. Blow guns and flying whitetails. Abraham Lincoln and the Wisconsin-Illinois Truce of '07. Aldo Leopold's warning. Icelandic immigrants who wave. These are just a few of the mysteries of Wisconsin River of Grace, a book that explores the irresistible pull of God's Country.

Your Annotated, Illustrated College Survival Guide, Volume I

Patrick J. Rothfuss
Publication Date:  2005
 
Patrick J. Rothfuss, with illustrations by B.J. Hiorns, brings us his first volume of Your Annotated, Illustrated College Survival Guide.
 
"Pat approaches everything with a childlike, almost infantile wonder. His wide-eyed amazement is so young and fresh it would be crispy, yet tender, if it was a vegetable." -B.J. Hiorns​
 
Availability: Out of print

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