Milkweed Editions to publish GENTIAN and NIGHTSHINING

I am beyond thrilled to be writing about socialist uprisings, floods, and time’s collapse in twinned books Gentian and Nightshining. They use local histories from my village Margaretville, the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s and the Rainmaker’s Flood of 1950, to explore politics and climate change. My move to the Catskills and my parents’ lives are braided through both as I search for their commitments to the socialist, collective and cooperative in Gentian (and join my local fire dept!) and in Nightshining look at the unintended harms in their belief in the public, in their fights for what they saw as the greater good. I am also overjoyed that Milkweed Editions is publishing them. (My dream was to work with Milkweed, and in particular Joey McGarvey who is editing the books, and it means I’ll share a publisher with poet Ada Limon and Robin Wall Kimmerer among other heroes of mine).