2022 publications, an end-of-year roundup

Watching the end-of-year lists roll in from authors I admire, on the one hand, I feel like I didn’t publish much this year: a few poems, a book review. But it was gratifying to see so many books I had a hand in finally enter the world as beautiful, tangible objects meeting a brand new audience of readers. It’s also been a year of beginnings. I launched a newsletter mid-year, and started a business. I think it’s easy to feel like things we can make happen for ourselves “don’t count” or matter less, but lately I’ve been thinking of lighthouses, how they send out a glow that helps people orient themselves and find the glow’s source.

I’m grateful to the online journals that published my work this year, and to the amazing authors whose work I had the pleasure of editing, and/or who I had the honor of supporting in-house at Soft Skull and Catapult.

High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez, published 1/11/22. This hilarious, beautiful memoir on fighting machismo and finding joy in queer spaces was reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lambda Literary, and On the Seawall, with other press at Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, TODAY, NBC News, the Los Angeles Times, and Oprah Daily,. And it’s sweeping the end-of-the-year best-of lists at Goodreads, HipLatina, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere.

I got to talk about High-Risk Homosexual at Publishers Weekly on 1/28/22, celebrating Edgar and their book being selected as an American Bookseller’s Association “Indies Introduce” title.

Path of Totality by Niina Pollari, published 2/8/22. This poetry collection, on the sudden and devastating loss of a child, is incredible. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Pollari writes with straightforward, heartbreaking clarity. These poems are unflinching and powerful.” The New York Times selected Path of Totality as a best poetry book of the year.

MONARCH by Candice Wuehle, published 3/29/22. This novel, at the intersection of trauma psychology, Y2K aesthetic, and occult academia, received rave reviews at NPR (and was named an NPR best book of the year), ZYZZYVA, Chicago Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal, with other press at NYLON, CrimeReads, Cleveland Review of Books, Luna Luna Mag, and Spin. MONARCH is also a contender in the 2023 Tournament of Books!

The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell, published 4/19/22. This candid, funny, searingly honest memoir on PMDD was well received in reviews at the Washington Post, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Full Stop, with other press at AutoStraddle, the Cut, Electric Literature, BBC, and Thinx, and more.

Two of my poems— “APPLICANT MUST HAVE” and “LOCAL BEAST, KIND OF A LITTLE BITCH, ACTUALLY” were published at HAD on 5/1/22.

I launched this newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual newsletter, on the summer solstice, 6/21/22 :)

Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk, published 7/19/22. This essay collection on plants, fiction, journalism, boundary-blurring, and the anthropocene was reviewed (and starred!) at Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, with other press at The Paris Review, n+1, LitHub, CRAFT, The Creative Independent, and BOMB.

Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert, published 9/13/22. This poetry collection on paradoxes and the tragicomedy of needing always to contend with time was reviewed at Publishers Weekly, Ploughshares, and Poetry Foundation, with other press at New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, LitHub, Chicago Review of Books, and The Slowdown with Ada Limón.

Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize, edited by Yuka Igarashi and me, with winning stories selected by judges Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw, published 9/20/22. Catapult published a roundtable interview with the judges and PEN America interviewed all twelve winning writers. Other press at Debutiful, Book Riot, and LitHub. An excerpt of the book—Yuka’s & my co-written intro—ran at Hobart.

My poem, “I Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained But the Concept Is Offensive and I’m Baby” was published at Hobart on 9/27/22, with many thanks to guest editor Taylor Byas.

After I dispatched my 9/21 newsletter, my beautiful friend Jeff Hinshaw invited me to record myself reading it for their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. The episode aired on 9/25/22.

The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden, published 10/18/22. This softly fierce memoir on endometriosis and the misogyny of modern medicine received great reviews at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and LitHub, with other press at Shondaland, Motherly, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hazlitt, and Salon.

Annnd after ten years of freelance editing around whatever else I was doing, I officially launched my manuscript-consultation business as an LLC on 10/31/22, a nice Halloween birthday.

At the tail end of 2022, on 12/27, The Rumpus published my review of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel Disorientation, one of the best books I read all year.

See you all in 2023!

Out now: THE TIGER AND THE CAGE and BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2022

Cover design by Nicole Caputo; animation by Elizabeth Yaffe

The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis is poet Emma Bolden’s debut memoir. For readers of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, this exquisitely wrought book recounts a lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis, while speaking more broadly to anyone who’s been told “it’s all in your head.”

With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine—from a history of labeling women “hysterical” and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases. Recounting botched surgeries and dire side effects from pharmaceuticals affecting her and countless others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by the official narratives of institutions meant to protect them.

It’s a beautiful, harrowing read. Bolden’s poetic command of language ensures that, though we plunge into the depths with her, we never drown.

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“An intimate, eloquent personal history of survival and self-discovery . . . One of the most riveting and accessible accounts of the experience of pain you’ll read all year.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“If pain is taboo, then the body becomes a very heavy thing. In The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden carries that weight in gorgeous, poetic prose infused with the kind of honesty that is difficult to turn away from . . . For any reader ever cast as the unreliable narrator of their own story, I suspect Bolden’s memoir will feel like a fierce, validating balm.” —Wynter K Miller, Electric Literature

“Bolden shines an unbearable, clinical light on how our desire to please, to be good, which serves us so well in school, can also lead to disaster . . . My sincerest hope is any woman—every woman—with medical problems no male doctor has yet bothered to really try and understand reads The Tiger and the Cage, a book that feels like the beginning of a new genre. There’s a guidebook, now. And a guide.” —Emily Van Duyne, Literary Hub

“Bolden’s memoir digs into the layers of sociocultural beliefs around menstruation, fertility, the expectations of women’s role to mate and procreate, and the indivisible links between sexuality, psychological security, desire, and self-awareness.” —Cat Woods, Shondaland

“[Bolden’s] lyrical descriptions and emotional honesty render this harrowing story hard to put down, and her critique of the medical establishment is both sharp and fair . . . A well-written, deeply researched, and searingly frank memoir about reproductive health.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Dark and riveting . . . [It] stings as much as it astounds.” —Publishers Weekly

“Emma Bolden’s The Tiger and the Cage is a memoir written as an investigation, a dive into what it means to be a woman caught in a medical establishment that doesn’t listen to women. I read this book in a fury. Bolden’s imagery is stark and vivid, and the prose moves in a spiral, encircling her pain, her confusion, and her strength. This book will make you laugh, cry, scream, and bleach your hair while you sing along loudly to Tori Amos. I am so grateful The Tiger and the Cage exists and so grateful for Emma Bolden’s generosity.” —Emme Lund, author of The Boy With a Bird in His Chest

“In The Tiger and the Cage, the call is coming from inside the house—or, rather, from inside the body. In the beautiful prose of a poet, Emma Bolden confronts the patriarchal foundation of the institutions that make our lives what they are: education, religion, medicine. If patriarchy—and frankly, misogyny—is part of medical ‘care,’ then via each surgeon’s scalpel and each prescribed medication, it is also inside us. The Tiger and the Cage opened my eyes, enraged me, and left me in awe of Bolden’s enormous talent as a writer, intelligence as a critic, and courage as a survivor.” —Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Keep Moving

“A harrowing portrait of endurance and grief and resilience. With raw honesty and exacting detail, Bolden tells an intimate story while exploring the demands our oppressive culture places on women—our supposed hopes and dreams, our supposed desires and fears, and most poignantly of all the expectations on our bodies, what they should do and how they should behave. It is part damning critique of our male-dominated medical institutions and, quietly, a loving tribute to a mother-daughter bond.” —Julianna Baggott, author of The Seventh Book of Wonders

“Layer by shimmering layer, Emma Bolden transforms the story of her body into the story of a search for truth. The Tiger and the Cage elegantly interrogates narratives of gender, pain, sexuality, and family to reveal the freedom underneath.” —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“In brief, lyrical, and powerful essays, Emma Bolden unleashes her story of endometriosis, and the misogyny she endured at the hands of the medical establishment, interwoven with stories of a supportive and loving Southern upbringing. The Tiger and the Cage is a torrent of feeling. It is a left-hook to the jaw to anyone learning for the first time about the neglectful ways women are often treated when their bodies need help. It is a soft, supportive whisper to those of us who know it too well. May it find its way into the hands of doctors and those in training, and their patients, too, who will find a voice in this book, one speaking with clarity and purpose, that affirms their own experiences.” —Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels

“This philosophical, funny, and beautiful memoir is both a work of art and a deep conversation about the rift between mind and body, those two great friends, and rivals, handcuffed together forever. Well-armed with a genuine Greek chorus, a truly excellent and private sense of humor, and incredible gifts for metaphor, Emma Bolden opens the vault for the reader into the true experience of how it feels to both reckon daily with a ravaging illness and also to carry on and make the most of one’s life.

If literature is the great river that runs alongside life, interpreting it, then this book is that river—[it] is deep and vigorous and vital, flashing with transcendence, thinking so richly about the human body, wondering at its mortality and fragility with love and humor and patience and strength.” —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

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Cover design by Nicole Caputo; Cover art by Sirin Thada

Now in its sixth year, the Best Debut Short Stories series is an annual anthology celebrating the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever published short fiction.

This was my second year co-editing with the wonderful Yuka Igarashi. This year’s judges were Deesha Philyaw, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Emily Nemens. The twelve honored writers, stories, and journals for 2022 are:

“A Wedding in Multan, 1978” (The Asian American Literary Review) Yasmin Adele Majeed
“All We Have Left is Ourselves” (Reckoning) Oyedotun Damilola Muees
“Beat by Beat” (Barrelhouse Magazine) Emma Shannon
“For Future Reference: Notes on the 7-10 Split” (The Cincinnati Review) Patch Kirschenbaum
“Man, Man, Et Cetera” (The Virginia Quarterly Review) Cal Shook
“Sacrilege” (BOMB Magazine) Edward Salem
“The Black Kite and the Wind” (Virginia Quarterly Review) Erin Connal
“The Cacophobe” (Ploughshares) Seth Wang
“The Chicken” (The White Review) RZ Baschir
“Them Bones” (Hobart) CK Kane
“Work Wives” (Typehouse Literary Magazine) Preeti Vangani
“Writing with Blood” (Flock) Catherine Bai

Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine’s Don’t Write Alone ran a roundtable interview with Deesha, Sabrina, and Emily; PEN interviewed each winning writer, with the whole series of interviews accessible here; and Hobart excerpted the intro that Yuka and I co-wrote. Other press at Lit Hub, BookRiot, and Debutiful.

Out now: BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2021 and a li'l microchap

Being that it is solidly, pumpkin spicédly autumn now, it is long past time to announce some fruits of the summer literary harvest!

Cover art by Sirin Thada, art direction by Nicole Caputo

The Best Debut Short Stories series is now in its fifth year. This annual anthology celebrates the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever fiction publication.

I’m honored to be an official co-editor for the series, having been involved in some capacity since its inception in 2017. We celebrated with a new cover design, with art direction by Nicole Caputo and gorgeous original art by Sirin Thada. This year’s judges were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote, honoring twelve debut writers and their debut stories:

“Force, Mass, Acceleration” (The Southern Review), Heather Aruffo
“Good Girls” (Barrelhouse), Lindsay Ferguson
“The First Time I Said It” (The Georgia Review), Isaac Hughes Green
“Maria” (Waxwing Magazine), Amy Haejung
“The Math of Living” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Nishanth Injam
“Transit” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Khaddafina Mbabazi
“Re:Frankie” (Porter House Review), Mackenzie McGee
“The Strong-Strong Winds” (adda), Mathapelo Mofokeng
“Salt” (Michigan Quarterly Review), Alberto Reyes Morgan
“The List” (Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art), Stanley Patrick Stocker
“Taxi” (Midwest Review), Pardeep Toor
“Mandy’s Mary Sue” (Sine Theta Magazine), Qianze Zhang

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine is doing an interview series with all of the winners, which you can read here. Debut writers, nominations for the 2022 prize are open through November 15th, so ask your editor to nominate you if you’re eligible!

Digital micro-chap

Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe,” a wee chap of 10 poems, is available now via Ghost City Press.

Ghost City Press selected my digital micro-chapbook for inclusion in their 2021 Summer Series. If you're interested in poems as meditations, poems as trances, Baba Yaga, hacking into the mainframe, and repurposed public domain images, come on down! Available here for the low price of FREE, or you can hit that donate button.

The LONG-AWAITED 2020 writing and editing roundup

Late to this party because time isn’t real. Before the infinite year finally ended, I did a little roundup on Twitter of everything I wrote and edited in 2020, sort of as proof? that things, small but meaningful things, still happen? and can help mark time? Like sand through an hourglass, tweets are (coarse and rough and irritating and…get everywhere?) ephemeral, so here’s the roundup again, where it’s likely to stay in one place for a while.

Essays, poems, etc. I wrote/published this year:

• “On ASMR, Anxiety, Relaxation in the Side-Hustle Economy, and Being Baby,” January 2020. My first Internet as Intimacy column, on the ASMR community and how, for someone who is anxious, receiving care across time/distance can be more relaxing than in-person care.

• “The Orchid’s Curse,” February 2020. This poem about Donna's monologue at Harry-the-orchid-guy was published in These Poems Are Not What They Seem (APEP Press, 2020), a Twin Peaks-themed collection edited by Kristin Garth and Justin Karcher. We had a virtual Performance Anxiety book launch.

• “Podcasts and Tarot Reading Showed Me How to Be Real Instead of 'Good,'” April 2020. My second column, on how podcasts and rituals helped me unbury my emotions and start to take up more space. I'd never been more afraid to share something I’d written; all of the comments and messages I received made me feel it was worth it. To everyone who reached out, even if I wasn’t able to respond: thank you.

• I wrote some dumb smut again for the revival of #shipwreckSF during a virtual “homewreck” event, April 2020. We wrecked Jane Austen’s Emma.

• “Of all the classes of people who ever lived” and “THE FINANCIAL BENEFITS OF CHIVALRY,” July 2020. My Phyllis Schlafly erasure poems in blood were published in Erase the Patriarchy (University of Hell Press, 2020), a beautiful, full-color anthology of art-as-poetry edited by Isobel O’Hare.

• “When the Internet Still Felt Like a Place, I Went There to Forget About My Body,” December 2020. My third (and maybe final?) Internet as Intimacy column, on the mortifying ordeal of having to exist in a physical form, and the powerful nostalgia I hold for the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s as I remember it. (Things I cut from this essay during its many drafts: secret sex codes in jelly bracelets, fear-mongering about teen texting acronyms, that time my face appeared in the Washington Post as an example of how well the Google Arts & Culture app works but no one noticed that I had dressed up as my doppelgänger as an illegibly “funny” prank...)

Essays and stories I edited for Catapult :

• “Prenatal Nightmares,” January 2020. This was the first essay for Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s Fear and Loathing in Utero column. “If I love you, then I’ve imagined your death a thousand times.”

• “It's a Boy! Whatever That Means,” March 2020. Maggie’s second column installment, on bad advice and gender nonsense.

• “AREA CANNIBALESS,” March 2020. Some visceral (I’m sure I’m not the first to make this joke) flash fiction by Lauren Friedlander. “I need for you to tell them about the boy, about what I’ve done. I need them to destroy me for it.” Mindblowing original art by Christina Chung.

• “Shlomo & Fanya,” April 2020. Short story by Angela Melamud, with several gorgeous illustrations by Gabriella Shery. “Blowing through fallen branches, cobwebs mask their faces. Their heels keep pace to a tempo the family knows by heart.”

• “The Gift of a Guilt-Free Epidural,” April 2020. Maggie’s final Fear and Loathing column. “Getting an epidural was an option that the instructor said could be necessary, and that we shouldn’t feel guilty taking. But she said this couched in a thousand reasons not to.”

• “Dying in America, or How to Become Completely Invisible,” May 2020. Essay by Bailey Cook Dailey, on navigating a lack of concrete etiquette for death and grief: “In this vacuum, the people in our lives and the people we encountered had reverted to what was easiest for them; denial, terror, avoidance.”

• “Montana Boys,” June 2020. Essay by Kamil Ahsan on navigating unspoken power dynamics in queer, interracial dating. “Suddenly, I felt comfortable saying out loud that he needed to reckon, really admit to himself, that what he was really saying was that he didn’t want to be with a brown person.”

• “Atrophy of the Author: In Fanfiction, Writers and Readers Are on More Equal Ground,” July 2020. Essay by Emilia Copeland Titus, on the world of fanfiction as a place to find community, hone craft, and reconsider the role of author. “The source text is almost superfluous, like a piece of art copied over and over until it is unrecognizable from the original.”

• “Living in Translation, or Why I Love Daffodils, an Unpopular Postcolonial Flower,” August 2020. Essay by Aruni Kashyap on reading and writing in multiple languages as a form of postcolonial resistance. “Underneath the sheen, it is a story that begins with epistemological violence; it is about the erasure of local languages and indigenous cultures.”

• “An Instrument of the Heart,” September 2020. Short Story by Nahida Nisa, on willfully ignoring trauma, and feeling/being alien. “She knew her mother’s planet must have been borne from the water and made entirely of it; she felt this is in her blood.”

• “An Ode to the Great Undead Novella,” October 2020. Essay by Aruni Kashyap on how “the death of the novella” is a U.S.-centric conversation. “Where I lived and grew up, the novella was never endangered. It was, in fact, a dominant genre that not only nourished our souls but also influenced public debates.”

Catapult and Soft Skull books:

I assisted series editor Yuka Igarashi with edits for Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize, published this fall (Catapult, 2020). This annual anthology features twelve prizewinning debut fiction writers; this past year’s winners were selected by judges Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth.

This year’s anthology features Ani Cooney, David Kelly Lawrence, Mohit Manohar, Valerie Hegarty, Kikuko Tsumura (translated by Polly Barton), Willa C. Richards, Kristen Sahaana Surya, Sena Moon, Damitri Martinez, Mbozi Haimbe, Matthew Jeffrey Vegari, and Shannon Sanders. Updates on winners present and past can be found at the Robert J. Dau Foundation website.

I acquired my first books for Soft Skull this year, which will roll out over the next long while: WHAT TO MISS WHEN, a new poetry collection by Leigh Stein (Fall 2021); HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL, a debut memoir by Edgar Gomez (Fall 2021), and MONARCH, a debut novel by poet Candice Wuehle (Spring 2022).