The Legacy Series in Short Fiction

Publishing story collections by new and emerging writers

$24.95 | November 2023 | 178 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-09-7

Maximum 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.

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

Praise for Maximum Speed

"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

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$24.95 | November 2023 | 208 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-10-3

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.

To pre-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

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$24.95 | November 2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-13-4

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.

To pre-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

$24.95 | October 2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-12-7

Fugitive 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.

To pre-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? 

$24.95 | October 2023 | 212 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-08-0

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.

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

Praise 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

Reviews & Interviews

Wisconsin Writers Association

$24.95 | October 2023 | 234 pp

Paperback | 979-1-960329-07-3

What Makes 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.

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

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

“This is a collection to be treasured, returned to, and remembered as a source of revelation.”

—Pamela Petro, author of The Long Field

“A deceptively simple style graced by brilliant detail and dialogue.”

—Ellen Prentiss Campbell, author of Frieda’s Song

“A collection that brings you in and takes you with it; every story is so deeply felt.”

—Louise Marburg, author of No Diving Allowed

“A memorable debut.”

—Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else

$24.95 | February 2023 | 204 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-35-9

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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Praise for Hoist House

“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)

South Carolina ReviewSouth Carolina Review.pdf

$21.95 | February 2023 | 148 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-34-2

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.

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 City The Pitch

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

$24.95 | February 2023 | 198 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-36-6

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.

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

$24.95 | February 2023 | 192 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-33-5

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.

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

Praise for 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

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

Windy City Reviews A Geography of ReadingReaders' Favorite

$24.95 | January 2023 | 234 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-76-4

Sometimes 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.

*Winner, Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction (Wisconsin Writers Awards 2022)

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

Praise for Sometimes Creek

“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

Kirkus Reviews Madison MagazineWisconsin State Journal

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection"

Wisconsin Writers Association CutBank (interview)

CutBank (review) Twin Cities Pioneer Press

Eyes on Imagination Hudson Star Observer

New Books in Literature

$24.95 | January 2023 | 184 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-77-1

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.

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

$24.95 | November 2022 | 220 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-72-6

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.

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

$28.95 | October 2022 | 374 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-73-3

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.

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, Among the Dead and Dreaming, Drift and Swerve, and Safe in Heaven Dead

“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

$21.95 | March 2022 | 150 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-04-3

eBook | 978-1-960329-16-5

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.

Paperback

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eBook

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

Front Cover_ARC.jpg

$21.95 | January 2022 | 268 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-67-0

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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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

$18.95 | December 2020 | 202 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-64-9

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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Praise for Responsible Adults

“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

$18.95 | December 2019 | 236 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-61-8

Great 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.

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

$18.95 | December 2018 | 242 pp

Paperback | 978-0-984673-97-1

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.

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

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

The Appointed Hour

Susanne Davis

The Appointed Hour shines a compassionate 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.

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

The Portage Poetry Series

Publishing pathbreaking poetry collections

$21.95 | January 2024 | 134 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-17-2

Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

Russell Thorburn

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Praise for Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

“What Thorburn brings to his subject matter moves beyond knowing and bleeds over into a way of seeing and saying and breathing. When I need to know who else in the world is feeling alive in the moment and nostalgic about the past and who wishes to celebrate those who’ve come before us, 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

“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 

“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

Reviews & Interviews

Public Radio 90 (WNMU)

$21.95 | September 2023 | 100 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-06-6

The Green Vault 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.

To pre-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

$21.95 | September 2023 | 106 pp
Paperback | 978-1-960329-02-8

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, relationships, 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.

To pre-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

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

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.

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

Praise for Everything 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

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

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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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

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

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 concision and stirring in its empathy, Silent Letter soars.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Kirkus Reviews Verse Daily

$21.95 | March 2023 | 106 pp
Paperback | 979-8-986966-37-3

Bowed 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.

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

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

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

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.

*FINALIST, Poetry: General (International Book Awards), 2022-2023

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

$21.95 | March 2023 | 110 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-31-1

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.

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

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

Publisher's WeeklyMacQueen's QuinterlyA Little Too Quiet

North of OxfordZYZZYVANew Books in Poetry

$18.95 | March 2023 | 84 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-32-8

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

"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

$21.95 | March 2023 | 82 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-79-5

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.

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

Bibliography_Monarch.pdf

Monarch Teaching Guide.pdf

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 necessary and important, and should be taught in schools.”

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

Reviews & Interviews

periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics Brooklyn Poets

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

$18.95 | March 2023 | 84 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986966-30-4

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.”

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

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

$18.95 | September 2022 | 108 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-75-7

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 durable 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

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

$20.95 | September 2022 | 134 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-09-8

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.

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

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

$21.95 | September 2022 | 172 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-71-9

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 desires, and complicated triumphs find a home in Harper’s first full-length collection.

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

Praise for The Found Object Imagines a Life

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

—Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic

“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

$18.95 | September 2022 | 82 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-70-2

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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Praise for Naming the Ghost

“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

$19.95 | April 2022 | 162 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-06-7

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.

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

“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

$18.95 | March 2022 | 118 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-03-6

After the 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.

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

Praise for After the 8-Ball

“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

$18.95 | December 2021 | 102 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-00-5

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.

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

$18.95 | December 2021 | 102 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-69-4

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.

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

$18.95 | December 2021 | 126 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-68-7

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.

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

$17.95 | May 2021 | 168 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-66-3

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 Wonderland 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.

*HONORABLE MENTION, Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award, 2021

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 Journal Sentinel Highland Park Poetry Madison Book Beat

Wisconsin People & Ideas Sundress Publications

Madison Public Library Arts + Literature Laboratory

$14.95 \| August 2020 \| 102 pp Paperback \| 978-1-733308-62-5	Lost and Found Departments Heather 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. 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*
$14.95 \| August 2020 \| 108 pp Paperback \| 978-1-733308-63-2	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
$14.95 \| August 2019 \| 114 pp Paperback \| 978-0-966848-88-5	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. 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 “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	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

The Back Home Series in Nonfiction

Publishing unique and original voices in creative nonfiction, memoir, and essays

$32.95 | November 2023 | 320 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-15-8

Wildlifer: Wisconsin Origin to Climate Change

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.

To pre-order directly from the press (20% discount), email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Wildlifer: Wisconsin Origin to Climate Change

“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, Secretary, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

“Marvelous writing—and exciting coverage over many years.”

—Estella Leopold, Professor Emerita of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle

$28.95 | September 2023 | 268 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-14-1

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.

To pre-order directly from the press (20% discount), 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

$24.95 | August 2023 | 228 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-99-8

The Long Fields: Essays of Home and Comfort

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.

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

$24.95 | August 2023 | 178 pp

Paperback | 978-1-960329-04-2

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 “kick out the bottom.”

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, George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature, 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, Professor of English, 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, Professor of English, St. John’s University, author of Being with a Bullet

$28.95 | December 2022 | 294 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-78-8

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.

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

$24.95 | November 2022 | 240 pp

Paperback | 979-8-986144-74-0

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.

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

Body 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.

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

$32.95 | April 2022 | 366 pp

Paperback | 978-1-737739-02-9

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.

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

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.

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

$18.95 | April 2021 | 130 pp

Paperback | 978-1-733308-65-6

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.

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 The Boom Project River Teeth

The Wisconsin Heritage Series

New editions of out-of-print or neglected books on or about Wisconsin and the Midwest

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$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.

$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

$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.
	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.
	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. Click to purchase
	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

Cornerstone Press

The Legacy Series in Short Fiction

Publishing story collections by new and emerging writers

M​​aximum Speed​

Kevin Clouther

​Praise for Maximum Speed

​The​​ Spirit in My Shoes

John Michael Cummings

​Praise for The Spirit in My Shoes

​Reach Her in This Light​​​

Jane Curtis

​Praise for Reach Her in This Light

​Fugitive Daydreams

Leah McCormack​​​

​Praise for Fugitive Daydreams

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

Jeff Esterholm​

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

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

Jody Hobbs Hesler​​​

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

​Hoist House: A Novella & Stories

Jenny Robertson

​Praise for Hoist House

Reviews & Interviews

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

South Carolina ReviewSouth Carolina Review.pdf

​Self-Defense

Corey Mertes

Praise for Self-Defense

Reviews & Interviews

West Trade Review In Kansas City​ The Pitch

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

​

​Where Are Your People From?

James B. De Monte

Praise for Where Are Your People From?

​Finding the Bones: Stories & A Novella

Nikki Kallio

Praise for Finding the Bones

Reviews & Intervie​ws

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

Windy City Reviews A Geography of Reading​Readers' Favorite ​

​Sometimes Creek

Steve Fox

Praise for Someti​mes Creek​

Reviews & Interviews

Kirkus Reviews Madison Magazine​Wisconsin State Journal​

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection"

Wisconsin Writers Association CutBank (interview)​

CutBank (review) Twin Cities Pioneer Press​

Eyes on Imagination​ Hudson Star Observer​​

New Books in Literature​​

​The Plagues

Joe Baumann

Praise for The Plagues

Reviews & Interviews

Peculiar Journal

​Kind of Blue

Christopher Chambers

Praise for Kind of Blue

Reviews & Interviews

​The Clayfields

Elise Gregory

Praise for The Clayfields

Reviews

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

​Twin Cities Pioneer Press Cutleaf​

​Evangelina Everyday

Dawn Burns

Reviews

Township

Jamie Lyn Smith

Praise for Township

Reviews & Interviews

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

Writer Writer Pants on Fire Now, Appalachia

Responsible Adults

Patricia Ann McNair

Praise for Responsible Adults

Maximum Speed

Praise for Maximum Speed

The Spirit in My Shoes

Praise for The Spirit in My Shoes

Reach Her in This Light

Praise for Reach Her in This Light

Fugitive Daydreams

Leah McCormack

Praise for Fugitive Daydreams

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

Jeff Esterholm

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

What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better

Jody Hobbs Hesler

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

Hoist House: A Novella & Stories

Praise for Hoist House

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

Self-Defense

West Trade Review In Kansas City The Pitch

Where Are Your People From?

Finding the Bones: Stories & A Novella

Reviews & Interviews

Windy City Reviews A Geography of ReadingReaders' Favorite

Sometimes Creek

Praise for Sometimes Creek

Kirkus Reviews Madison MagazineWisconsin State Journal

Wisconsin Writers Association CutBank (interview)

CutBank (review) Twin Cities Pioneer Press

Eyes on Imagination Hudson Star Observer

New Books in Literature

The Plagues

Kind of Blue

The Clayfields

Twin Cities Pioneer Press Cutleaf

Evangelina Everyday

Publishing pathbreaking poetry collections

Praise for Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

Reviews & Interviews

Public Radio 90 (WNMU)

David Salner

Praise for The Green Vault Heist

We Are Reckless

Praise for We Are Reckless

Everything Waits

Praise for Everything Waits

There is a Corner of Someplace Else

Praise for There is a Corner of Someplace Else

Catherine Kyle

Reviews & Interviews

Kirkus Reviews Verse Daily

Bowed As If Laden With Snow

New Books in Poetry

Publisher's WeeklyMacQueen's QuinterlyA Little Too Quiet

North of OxfordZYZZYVANew Books in Poetry