Category Archives: Awards

Fall 2024 News Round-Up

Awards, BookEnds Book Club, BookEnds novels, Literary Community, Mentors, Publication, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2024 has seen the publication of two BookEnds novels: Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW) was published in April, and you can watch the BookEnds BookClub featuring Nora in conversation with her mentor and program co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell here. Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Books) was published in July, and Joselyn was in conversation with her mentor and other program co-founding director, Meg Wolitzer, at the BookEnds BookClub in September. Check out their conversation here.

2022 Fellow Giano Cromley’s BookEnds novel American Mythology is forthcoming with Doubleday in Fall 2025, while 2023 Fellow Miranda Shulman’s BookEnds novel Harmless is forthcoming with Dutton in Spring 2026. Another BookEnds novel is under contract and will be announced soon, while several other BookEnds novels are out on submission, and we expect more happy news to come! Several Fellows from our recent and incoming cohorts have also signed with agents this spring. 

Further doings, honors, and publications:

Jeanne Blasberg (2022) published her BookEnds novel Daughter of a Promise with SheWrites Press. 

Elisabeth Chaves (2022) received the Nancy Zafris Short Story Fellowship from The Porches. 

Sheena Cook (2019) was longlisted for the World of Interiors writing contest.

Sam Corradetti (2024) had a short story published in this summer’s issue of Fourteen Hills.

Vanessa Cuti (2018, author of BookEnds novel The Tip Line, and a BookEnds mentor) has a short story forthcoming in The Harvard Review. 

April Darcy (2020) has a short story forthcoming in Water~Stone Review. Another story was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Disquiet International Literary Program, and the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. 

Kathleen Gibbons (2019) was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2023 with a novel-in-progress, and two stories from her BookEnds linked story collection have received Pushcart Prize nominations. She will be in residence at the Ragdale Foundation in 2025. 

Sarah Haufrect (2022) was published in June by West Trade Review, and the story will be coming out this month as an audio exclusive on the magazine’s Youtube channel. 

Maggie Hill (2019) published her BookEnds novel Sunday Money with SheWrites Press earlier this year. 

Craig Holt (2023) has a short story forthcoming in MicroLit Almanac. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier (2023) attended both Community of Writers and Bread Loaf earlier this year. 

Rachel León (2021) is editing an anthology about Rockford, Illinois, with Belt Publishing, and has just been named Managing Editor for The Chicago Review of Books. 

Sue Mell (2020, author of the BookEnds novel Provenance) published her short story collection A New Day with SheWrites Press. 

O. Edwin Ozoma (2024) published a short story in Harpur Palate.

Melanie Pierce (2021) has a short story forthcoming in Moon City Review. 

JP Solheim (2020, BookEnds Associate Director) was in residence at the Ragdale Foundation this summer. They were longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2023. Their short stories have recently been published at MQR: Mixtape and on the Midwest Weird literary podcast.

Hannah Thaggard (2024) had a short story published in Harpur Palate. 

BookEnds alums are also busy and active in their communities, with new works in progress; supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. Check out this new post from 2024 Fellow Caitlin O’Neil on cutting characters with her mentor Meg Wolitzer (and remember to check out Meg  as the host of Selected Shorts!)

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon. To learn more about BookEnds, check out our Fall 2024 Open House!

What My Mentor Taught Me: Meg Wolitzer on Unjamming the Narrative

Awards, Creative process, Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Publication, Revision,

2021 Fellow Coco Picard on her work on two manuscripts with the BookEnds co-founding director.

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with two manuscripts, The Healing Circle, (Red Hen Press, 2022) and a nascent work, The Other Jane Dick. In looking at these projects with Meg’s generous and laser-sharp attention, I discovered my propensity to pack in the jokes. “Give them space,” Meg said. To let them land. Not only to provide the manuscripts a broader range of emotion and depth, but to let the reader enjoy the experience of reading without (my words) being force fed. 

Because I have a visual art background, I think about scenes and narrative like a painting: ranging contrasts and saturation are important in a picture. It’s essential that the individual components that make a composition serve rather than dominate the whole. Colors respond to one another. The relationship between shapes must be harmonious. My tendency, I discovered, was to try to make every part of my composition (or novel) a punchline. Meg and I talked about this. “Probably it’s because someone somewhere along the line liked that.” 

I realized that one way I mitigate my insecurities about longform fiction is by pushing the scenarios into absurdity, almost as a way of sublimating my own anxieties driving character dilemmas. So, for instance, The Healing Circle began as a nonlinear story of a hospitalized woman searching for a miracle cure. The Other Jane Dick is about a heartsick, low-rung art curator, who accepts an invitation to attend a globe-trotting, “branding” junket. In both books, the initial drafts kept everything on the surface. It was as though each narrative arc and its contextualizing world was described in saturated, dense colors, all sardonic, jokey, self-aware, and hard-nosed. In both instances, my characters refused sympathy as a result. They exhibited little emotional range and consequently denied that range of the book, withholding what was at stake in such a way as to ultimately refuse admitting a reader into the watery marshlands of vulnerability, change, and consequence. 

In recognizing the ways that I jam jokes, I was able to recognize that tendency in other formal decisions. Meg helped me prioritize certain aspects in each book over others. She encouraged me to reduce the waxing philosophic monologues (a little goes a long way) in The Healing Circle and make the individual threads of that book linear, even if different time frames punctured the fictive present. Similarly, in The Other Jane Dick, Meg helped me add space between elements to more fully highlight the difference between contemporary art culture and influencer culture so that my protagonist’s imposter syndrome came across.

Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent. My characters—all of them—are significantly more compelling and complex because of that mentorship and the space it afforded. 

Coco Picard was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her novel The Healing Circle won the 2020 Women’s Prose Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Comics and criticism have appeared additionally in The Paris Review, Seven Stories Press, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is the author of The Chronicles of Fortune(Radiator Comics, 2017) and founded  the Green Lantern Press in 2004. www.cocopicard.com

Congratulations Caitlin Mullen!

Awards,

Caitlin Mullen has won the Mystery Writers of America 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Award for the Best First Novel. Her novel Please See Us was also named a New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2020. A BookEnds 2018-2019 Fellow, Caitlin is also a graduate of the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing & Literature. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Saltonstall Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. You can read more about the writing of Please See Us in an interview with Caitlin by BookEnds 2019-2020 Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin at Fiction Writers Review. Congratulations, Caitlin!