Celebrating Books by 2020 Baltimore Review Contributors!
by Barbara Westwood Diehl
As 2020 comes to a close, we'd like to share good news about some of our contributors' recently published and forthcoming books. I hope that you will support our contributors, and other wonderful writers, by purchasing their books—and the literary journals in which their work appears—in the coming year.
Wishing all of you a happy and healthy 2021, full of excellent reading and writing!
Congratulations to Matthew E. Henry on the publication of two chapbooks, Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag) and Dust and Ashes (Californios Press), which can be purchased through the publishers or the author's website.
On Teaching While Black:
In this book, MEH, a.k.a Matthew E. Henry, offers fascinating snapshots of teacher-student predicaments that can occur for an African American in a white system. But the book also reveals the ironies involved in exchanges between any well-educated teacher and youngsters in school. Towards the end of the book Matthew reveals his own history as a student—how it felt to be bussed and educated in the white system he has now joined. These poems are deeply moving because they are so deeply felt, so carefully, lovingly crafted. - Jeanne Murray Walker, Author of Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking
On Dust and Ashes
In Dust & Ashes, Matthew E. Henry crafts ekphrastic poems out of a wealth of texts and images. From Cabanel’s Fallen Angel to the novels of Toni Morrison to images of Olympic protest, these poems are alive to the moral complexity and complicity involved in human art and culture. Through the two ‘Testaments’ of the collection, the reader is led toward the memento mori of the title.” - Californios Press
Congratulations to Ellie Roscher! Her book 12 Tiny Things (co-author, Heidi Barr) will be coming out soon from Broadleaf Books. "In a culture that says bigger is better, it is subversive work to take tiny, lasting steps toward learning and growth. In 12 Tiny Things, authors Ellie Roscher and Heidi Barr companion readers toward a more rooted life of simplicity and intentionality."
Congratulations to Merrill Oliver Douglas! Her chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press. "Parking Meters into Mermaids is rich with transformation: daughter to mother, body to spirit, domestic to global." – Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark (2013) and Crude Angel (2018), both from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)
Congratulations to Naomi Cohn! The Braille Encyclopedia was selected for publication by Rose Metal Press. "Through definitions, historical research, medical terms, and reflective vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked prose poems examines and illuminates the author’s experience of progressive vision loss and learning to read and write in braille as an adult."
Amy L. Clark's first novel, Palais Royale, was published by Engine Books in December. "When her brother-in-law dies, Evey and her husband, "Sebastian, must return to their hometown in Maine to attend the funeral. They end up at the Palais Royale-where Evey spent many drunken nights before leaving town, and an unstable first husband, five years ago-on the night before the bar closes its doors forever. Amid a vivid tapestry of memorable townspeople in this tightly-woven novel, Evey ventures through her troubled personal history and tries to navigate an uncertain future." You can purchase it here.
We look forward to sharing more good news from our contributors in our blog and on Facebook and Twitter in the new year. Maybe even this year. It's not over yet!