Thanks to the 2015
Beltran Family Teaching Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I'll be given an opportunity to create an event for faculty and students in the 2015/2016 academic year. I'm so grateful to my university, the KWH, and my dear students, who nominated me for the award.
Whatever Doesn't Kill You, the Shebooks anthology featuring
Nest. Flight. Sky. along with five additional pieces by exquisite writers (and edited by Laura Fraser), won a Silver IPPY Award. We're so happy for Laura, especially, who has put so much of her soul into
Shebooks.The 2
015 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English accepted a proposal on teaching creativity and responsibility through the arts that will bring together the amazing illustrator
Melissa Sweet, two fantastic teachers (Glenda Cowen-Funk and Paul Hankins), and me. I can't wait for this. And: it will be my first time ever to Minneapolis.
I found
One Thing Stolen in bookstores, when I wasn't even looking for it. Huge thanks to Forever Young Adult, for
this generous review of the book.
Deeply grateful to Laura Fraser and Peggy Northrop and the entire Shebooks team for including
Nest. Flight. Sky.: on love and loss, one wing at a time in a first print anthology that also features the work of Mary Jo McConahay (on war reporting in Central America), Faith Adiele (on women's health), Barbara Graham (on abuse), Ethel Rohan (on survival and forgiveness), and Susan Ito (on the search for a birth mother).
The book is here, with me, and and now available for order. I am especially grateful to Beth Hoffman, the incredibly talented and generous author of
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and
Looking for Me, for lending her voice to the back cover.
I am deeply honored to have my memoir, Nest. Flight. Sky., selected as one of six memoirs for the first Shebooks print anthology. I stand in glorious good company. I am grateful to Laura Fraser, Peggy Northrop, and the entire Shebooks family, and I cannot wait to hold this book in my hands.
Shebooks, a new media company devoted to women’s storytelling, presents its best short memoirs in this print anthology, Whatever Doesn’t Kill You: Six Memoirs of Resilience, Strength, and Forgiveness.
In “Ricochet: Two women war reporters and a friendship under fire,” award-winning journalist Mary Jo McConahay explores the personal toll of war reporting in Central America.
Playwright and author Barbara Graham’s delicate “Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence” takes on the taboo topic of women abusing younger girls.
Susan Ito’s “The Mouse Room” is the quirky tale of a young woman working in a genetics lab while trying to find her own birth mother.
Faith Adiele’s “ The Nordic-Nigerian Girls’ Guide to Lady Problems” makes a trip to the gynecologist’s office funny, while exposing racial disparities in women’s health care.
Award-winning short story writer Ethel Rohan’s “Out of Dublin” is an exquisite tale of emotional survival.
In the gorgeous “Nest. Flight. Sky.” memoirist Beth Kephart muses on her mother’s death and her new-found obsession with birds.
All these true life stories are brave and beautifully written. The authors use the power of writing to understand and transcend challenges– their memoirs are an inspiration for all of us.
Edited by Laura Fraser.
“Shebooks are essential for a well-read life”-- Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You
You know how proud I am to be a Shebooks author. You know how much I've loved the Shebooks I've read. You know how much it means to be able to support other writers of fiction, memoir, long-form journalism. To support other women, too.
And so here I am with Shebooks again, but this time I'm talking about the Kickstarter campaign. I'm going to let the official press release speak for Shebooks here. But I hope you'll stop to watch the movie. To be inspired by it, even, to help the campaign, to write a Shebooks of your own.
Shebooks Launches Kickstarter for its 2014 Equal Writes Campaign
New digital publisher kicks off campaign to raise awareness of gender bias in publishing.
San Francisco, CA (May 27, 2014) – Shebooks, a new digital publisher of short e-books by women,
today launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise awareness of the gender bias in publishing—and to
build a fund to pay women writers. “Our goal is to publish as many short e-books by women as we
can this year.” says Laura Fraser, Shebooks Cofounder and Editorial Director. “As an author, I’ve seen the space for quality women's writing shrink and shrink. That’s why we started Shebooks, to give more women a platform to publish their work.”
The 30-day Kickstarter campaign has a goal to raise $50K, all of which will go to pay women writers in 2014. At every pledge level, Shebooks offers fun, creative campaign rewards, including a Shebooks subscription, a chance to get your own original work published in an upcoming Girl Power anthology, an “EQUAL WRITES” T-shirt, a night out with Shebooks authors, author visits to your book club, the opportunity to have a protagonist named after you in an upcoming book, and much more.
To date, Shebooks has published over 40 original books by top authors and journalists. Shebooks
authors include international bestselling author Hope Edelman, New York Times-bestselling author
Caroline Leavitt, former Deputy Editor of Essence Teresa Wiltz, founder of Ms. Magazine Suzanne
Braun Levine, and National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart. This week’s Shebook, I’ll Give You
Something to Cry About, is an original novella by New York Times-bestselling novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who was recently named the Anna Quindlen writer-in-residence at Barnard.
“We are thrilled by the quality of the e-books that we’ve published so far and are excited to discover
new voices and publish many more,” says Peggy Northrop, Cofounder and President of Shebooks.
“Kickstarter is the perfect vehicle for getting the word out to a wide audience about this exciting new media form.”
About Shebooks
Shebooks is a new publisher of short e-books by and for women, cofounded in 2013 by magazine
editor Peggy Northrop, bestselling author Laura Fraser, and media executive Rachel Greenfield.
Shebooks.net offers a curated collection of original and hard-to-find memoir, fiction, and journalis tailored to women and designed to be read in under two hours. Shebooks can be purchased individually for $2.99 or by subscription.
The thing is: I had already won.
I had been invited to the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards Program, sponsored by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society New York City—Southern New York Chapter. I was seeing friends—Darcy Jacobs, nominee Patty Chang Anker, Katie Freeman, Julia Johnson, my Gotham editor, Lauren Marino. My husband had joined me for the evening, our sensational son had left work to see us an hour before, Jenny Powers, VP of Special Events for the Society, had put on an amazing show of truly exceptional everythings at The TimesCenter. I had a new pink dress, those famous new shoes, and Maggie Scarf, the bestselling author, was telling my husband and me a story that held us both in captive disbelief. Soon I would go down that long flight of stairs and find the fabulous Lee Woodruff in the bathroom. We would speak of pink dresses, pink scarves, the sometimes good luck of fashion.
Earlier in the day, the phenomenal team at Chronicle Books had posted
the stunning new trailer for Going Over, my soon-to-be-launched Berlin novel.
School Library Journal had named
Going Over the
Pick of the Day. Laura Fraser of
Shebooks had sent sweet news. The weather was kind. Only two-thirds of my hair was a mess.
And so I settled back into my chair at The TimesCenter simply to watch the show. To be grateful for it all. To be unencumbered, for that moment, by doubt. The first category of ten to be announced was the Motivational category.
Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, a book about the students I love and the things they have taught me, sat (remarkably) alongside
The Novel Cure (Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin),
Saturday Night Widows (Becky Aikman),
Survival Lessons (Alice Hoffman), and
On These Courts (Wayne B. Drash). Meredith Vieira—gorgeous Meredith Vieira—was looking stunning up there on the stage, post Sochi, post Oscars. She was reading off the nominees, then opening an envelope, and then—and then—she called my name.
I have never been so unprepared for anything in my life. I had not, for a single second, rehearsed the possibility of the moment; winning was out of the question. I had a wide stage to cross, and by the time I reached the microphone and Meredith's outstretched arms, I had been rendered incapable of speech. I have absolutely no idea what words I finally said. I know only that I told Meredith how beautiful she really is (inside and out). I know that I struggled to find words for the beauty of my students. I know I said "son" and "husband" and "Gotham" and "dreams."
(How grateful am I to Lauren Marino, Lisa Johnson, Beth Parker, and the entire Gotham team for saying yes to this book in a seaside nano-second. And a million thanks to my agent, Amy Rennert, who has supported this book from the second it arrived in her to-be-read bin.)
Afterward, when all the winners gathered on stage for a
Publishers Weekly photograph, I had an opportunity to speak with Meredith, to learn more about her upcoming new program,
The Meredith Vieira Show. It is going to be wonderful because she is through-and-through wonderful. A real show, real conversations, a set that recreates her own family room, her own interests, pursued. Look for it come Labor Day.
I end this as I must end this—with prayers for those who are living with and seeking to combat multiple sclerosis, a haunting condition about which important words were spoken last night. Without organizations like the New York City—Southern New York Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society—organizations that work throughout the year to raise awareness and research dollars, bring together authors and publishers, put leading lights like Meredith Vieira, Lee Woodruff, Arianna Huffington, Pamela Paul, Mark Bittman, and Richard Pine on one stage, and gather friends—hope would not loom so large.
I have never been so proud to bring an honor home.
I head to South Carolina in a few hours to serve as the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Distinguished Writer. This is the week of a lifetime.
