Bookstock Authors and Poets Appearing in 2025!
Authors
by Marjan Kamali
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation. She forms a strong bond with a girl in school but later on, they drift apart until her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives. Marjan Kamali, born in Turkey to Iranian parents, spent her childhood in Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. She’s the 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award and the author of two other novels.
by Alison Espach
Alison Espach is the New York Times best-selling author of The Wedding People, a propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew. The Wedding People is a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a TODAY Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club pick, a Barnes and Noble Book Club Pick, and the #1 Indie Next Pick for August 2024. She is also the author of Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, a Chicago Tribune and NPR “Best Book of 2022,” as well as The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Barnes and Noble Discover pick.
Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl
by Hyeseung Song
For readers of Crying in H Mart comes a “scorchingly honest…hugely evocative memoir” (Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk) about the daughter of ambitious Asian-American immigrants and her search for self-worth. The daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spent her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas. As she grows, years of self-erasure take a toll on Song and she experiences recurring episodes of depression. She enters a psychiatric hospital, where begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything. Now, Hyeseung Song is a writer and painter, who lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero
by Peter S. Canellos
The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero
The definitive, sweeping biography of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.
by Kevin Fedarko
From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile, a rollicking and poignant account of an epic 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America’s most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth. Kevin Fedarko has spent the past twenty years writing about conservation, exploration, and the Grand Canyon. The Emerald Mile, which won a National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award, was a New York Times bestseller.
An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands
by Steve Kemp
An Exaltation of Parks reveals the inspiring story of this collaboration, showing how the partnership transformed some of America’s most cherished national parks, including Acadia, Grand Tetons, Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. It recounts Rockefeller’s lifelong dedication to conservation, digging into his own pockets and toiling as a volunteer to achieve his goals for converting private land into public use. Bringing to life the history and significance of America’s most magnificent landscapes, this volume is both a tribute to past conservation victories and a call to action for the future, emphasizing the need for continued vigilance to preserve these national treasures for generations to come
Poets
by Alison Prine
Alison Prine’s spectacular collection, Loss and Its Antonym, sweeps across a lifetime in an attempt to find the right antonym for grief—knowing full well the bittersweet futility of such a project. The only way is through, and through we go: wrestling the devastating loss of the mother in a car accident, which the speaker survived as a child, and other family traumas. Time is the great and ruthless healer of this book, with which the speaker directly converses. While echoes of the past continue to haunt, repair is found in the book’s appreciation for the world: chilly Vermont winters with fresh snow, erotic peonies in season, lush plumages of birds, wounded sugar maples, budding lesbian romances, simple breezes. Here, the poem itself is the only antonym for loss.
—Bianca Stone, author of What Is Otherwise Infinite
Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022
by Major Jackson
A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems selected from five acclaimed volumes of poetry. It was designated one of Literary Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023. Major Jackson’s honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review, he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
by Didi Jackson
In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist. These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Didi Jackson is also the author of Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines.
by Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years. In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. Pinsky was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997-2000 and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.