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In Place emerges from a desire to uncover more books about the complexity and richness of place. This series publishes literary nonfiction in various forms—narrative nonfiction, memoir, essay collections, cultural mediation, and others—focusing on books firmly rooted in place. In Place creates a space to explore lives, history, and landscapes.

The series seeks manuscripts that are both artful and accessible by emerging and established authors, and it will value work that explores the world in all of its detail and subtlety in order to uncover the universal within the particular.

The eeries editors are especially interested in places that are sometimes overlooked, in particular complex regions loaded with stories that seem somewhat voiceless in the current literary landscape. This series embodies Eudora Welty’s idea that “One place understood helps us understand all places better.”

Series Editors:

Jeremy Jones (MFA, University of Iowa) is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries and Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland, which won the gold IPPY in memoir and was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction. His essays appear in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and Brevity, among others, and have been named Notable in Best American Essays. He is associate professor of English at Western Carolina University.

Elena Passarello (MFA, University of Iowa) is a writer, performer, and the recipient of a Whiting Award. She is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat, both from Sarabande Books. Recent essays appear in The New York Times, McSweeney's, National Geographic, Paris Review, Audubon, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.  Elena has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Hambidge Center, and the Oregon Literary Arts Foundation. She is an associate professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and director of the MFA program at Oregon State University. 

Advisory Board:,

Sarah Einstein (PhD, Ohio University) is the author of Tripart Heart (Sundress, 2018), Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press, 2015), and Remnants of Passion (Shebooks, 2014), as well as numerous essays and short stories. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, Notable Essay status in Best American Essays, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the founding editor of Signal Mountain Review.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest (MFA, University of Iowa) is the author of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. BorderlandsMexican Enough: My Life Between the BorderlinesAround the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, as well as the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She is professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has won a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Viebranz Professorship to St. Lawrence University, the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize.

Silas House (MFA, Spalding University) is the author of five novels, three plays, and is the co-author of a creative nonfiction book about social protest. He serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Literature at Berea College's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing. House is a frequent contributor to several publications including the New York TimesOxford American, the Southeast Review, and Newsweek. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the E. B. White Award, Appalachian Book of the Year, Chaffin Prize for Literature, and Audie awards. He is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year, and recipient of the Lee Smith Award, the Hobson Medal for Literature, and the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association.  

Bret Lott (MFA, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) is the author of fourteen books, most recently the essay collection Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian (Crossway, 2013) and the novel Dead Low Tide (Random House, 2012). He is the nonfiction editor of Crazy Horse and a professor of English at the College of Charleston.

Peggy Shumaker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Toucan Nest (Red Hen Press, 2014) and the memoir Just Breathe Normally (University of Nebraska Press). Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainer Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publisher of fine art and literature from Alaska, and edits the Alaska Literary series at University of Alaska Press. She was the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010–2012.

Ryan Van Meter (MA, DePaul, and MFA, University of Iowa) is an assistant professor in University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is the author of the essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Sarabande, 2011). His work has appeared inthe Gettysburg ReviewIowa ReviewNinth Letter, and Fourth Genre, among others. A recent finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, which celebrates the best LGBTQ books of the year, he has also been awarded residences by the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts.

Wendy S. Walters (MFA/PhD, Cornell) is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), Troy Michigan (Futurepoem Books, 2014), and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press, 2009). Walters was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and her work has appeared in the Iowa Review, Bookforum, FENCE, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of nonfiction in the writing program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. 

For more information:

Authors interested in submitting proposals for consideration should contact Marguerite Avery at marguerite.avery@mail.wvu.edu

 

Sienna background with a painting of trees leaning over a creek with text underneath: Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy by Erik Reece

Clear Creek
Erik Reece

Cream background with black title, subtitle on yellow rectangle on top of a mural made out of cut out images of maps of Oregon, North Carolina, megaladon teeth, trees, a white house on a green lawn, a staircase, and early adolescent girls talking on porch sitting in chairs

Curing Season
Kristine Langley Mahler

A Year without Months cover: white lettering on a blurred green tinted photo of sticks in a pile as the background


A Year without Months
Charles Dodd White

American Vaudeville cover


American Vaudeville
Geoffrey Hilsabeck

This Way Back


This Way Back
Joanna Eleftheriou
 


The Painted Forest
Krista Eastman

 


Far Flung
Cassandra Kircher


Lowest White Boy
Greg Bottoms
 



On Homesickness
Jesse Donaldson