Micah Perks is an American fiction writer and memoirist. Her three books, We Are Gathered Here (St. Martin's Press 1997), Pagan Time (Counterpoint Press 2001), and What Becomes Us (Outpost19 Books 2016) examine the utopian impulse in U.S. history.
Micah Perks grew up on a commune in the Adirondack Mountains. She later went to high school in Middlebury, Vermont, and received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She is a 2008 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship Grant, [1] five Pushcart Prize nominations and has been a resident of the Blue Mountain Center several times. She has taught at Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is Professor of Literature and Co-Director of The Creative Writing Program, with her partner, Latin American/Latino critic Juan Poblete. They live in Santa Cruz, California with their four children.
We Are Gathered Here (St. Martin's 1997) is set in the 1880s. Regina Sartwell, a wealthy young woman with epilepsy, and Olive Honsinger, her maid, join in friendship and a fierce desire to escape Victorian conventions. As Perks describes in "Escaping the Ending," [2] this novel is based on her great, great aunt Regina, who was imprisoned in her home because she had epilepsy. She jumped from her third floor window three times before she succeeded in killing herself. Perks writes: "I wanted to reach back in time and find another way out for her." In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Feb. 18, 1996, Erin J. Aubry writes "We are Gathered Here is nothing short of a woman's manifesto. It addresses an astonishing array of issues--independence, marriage, work, female companionship, goddess worship, pregnancy, abortion, emotional repression, sexual abuse--all in a tightly woven story that is as fanciful as it is grimly real...This is a book that reaches across more than 100 years of difference between its time and ours to affirm an eternal human need for love, with not a whit of energy lost in the translation."
What Becomes Us (Outpost19 Books). In this novel, twin fetuses tell the story of their mild-mannered mother who abandons her controlling husband to start fresh in a small town in upstate New York. But her seemingly ideal neighbors are violently divided by the history Evie is teaching at the high school—the captivity and restoration of colonist Mary Rowlandson, a watershed conflict that leads our little narrators to ask big questions about love, survival, coveting the man next door and what exactly is a healthy appetite. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, writes "I've been obsessed with Mary Rowlandson for 20 years. Micah Perks writes about her with fireworks. This is a warm, wild, hilarious, eccentric and moving book."
Pagan Time (Counterpoint hardcover 2001, paperback forthcoming November, 2009) is a memoir about Perks' childhood growing up in an experimental commune school in the Adirondack Mountains during the sixties and early seventies. "This wonderful book has distilled the sixties into a rare and potent tincture. It is bittersweet, dangerous, full of mad enthusiasms, wild adventures, sexual excess, and genuine tragedy. Micah Perks never loses her perfect pitch...I could not put it down and cannot forget it." Peter Coyote
Mary Rowlandson, née White, later Mary Talcott, was a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans in 1676 during King Philip's War and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed. In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was published. This text is considered a formative American work in the literary genre of captivity narratives. It went through four printings in 1682 and garnered readership both in the New England colonies and in England, leading some to consider it the first American "bestseller".
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult coming-of-age epistolary novel by American writer Stephen Chbosky, which was first published on February 1, 1999, by Pocket Books. Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows Charlie, an introverted observing teenager, through his freshman year of high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. The novel details Charlie's unconventional style of thinking as he navigates between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, and attempts to deal with poignant questions spurred by his interactions with both his friends and family.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular "Burn Notice" series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
Melissa de la Cruz is a New York Times bestselling Filipina-American author known for her work in young adult fiction. She has written several series of young adult novels, including the Au Pair series and the Blue Bloods series, and a contemporary fiction series following The Beauchamp Family, as well as a number of stand-alone novels.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is a Chicana poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista, as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Jean Marie Rikhoff was an American author and editor. She is best known for writing two trilogies: the Timble Trilogy, made up of Dear Ones All, Voyage In, Voyage Out, and Rites of Passage, and the trilogy of the North Country, consisting of Buttes Landing, One of the Raymonds, and The Sweetwater.
Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of six published poetry collections, an essay collection, and currently teaches classes at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.
Jessica Fisher is an American poet, translator, and critic. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Gary Eugene Young is an American poet, printer and book artist. In 2010, he was named the first ever Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County.
Nancy Vieira Couto is an American poet. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts for Poetry award.
Beth Lisick is an American writer, performer, and author of six books. With Arline Klatte, she co-founded the Porchlight Storytelling Series of spoken word performances in San Francisco in 2002. Her spoken word performances were featured at the Lollapalooza festival, the South by Southwest Music Festival, Bumbershoot, and Lilith Fair. She has toured with Sister Spit. She has also performed sketch comedy with the group White Noise Radio Theatre at SF Sketchfest and has an ongoing film and stage collaboration with Tara Jepsen. The pair wrote and acted in an original web series entitled "Rods and Cones", which was named one of Indiewire's 25 Best Series/Creators of 2014.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.
Ellen Bass is an American poet and co-author of The Courage to Heal.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a 2012 American coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Stephen Chbosky, based on his own 1999 novel of the same name. Logan Lerman stars as a teenager named Charlie who writes to an unnamed friend, and these epistles chronicle his trials, tribulations, and triumphs as he goes through his freshman year of high school. The film depicts his struggles with his, unbeknownst to him, post-traumatic stress disorder, as he goes through his journey in high school making new friends, portrayed by Emma Watson and Ezra Miller. The film's ensemble cast also includes Mae Whitman, Kate Walsh, Dylan McDermott, Joan Cusack, and Paul Rudd in supporting roles.
Laura Pritchett is an American writer. Pritchett is the author of five literary novels and one book of nonfiction. Her work is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by her native Colorado. Both her fiction and nonfiction often focus on issues of ecology, conservation, climate change, and social justice issues. She has been awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction, the High Plains Literary Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA Fiction Award, and others. She is the editor of three anthologies, all on environmental topics, and writes regularly for magazines.
Wendy J. Fox is an American author born in Washington. She is most known as a writer of fiction and has twice been a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. In 2015, she was nominated for her collection "The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories" and in 2020, she was a finalist in literary fiction for "If the Ice Had Held." Fox has published short stories in ZYZZYVA, Tampa Review, The Pinch, and Washington Square Review, among others. She has also written for popular magazine outlets like Self, Business Insider, and The Rumpus. She was included in 2006's Tales from the Expat Harem, an anthology of female writers based on the experiences of living in Turkey. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
Banu Bargu is a U.S.-based political theorist and professor of History of Consciousness and Political Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Naima Coster is a Dominican-American writer known for her debut novel, Halsey Street, which was published in January 2018. Coster is the recipient of numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows is a 2014 book of poetry by the Korean American poet Eugenia Leigh. It was well received, reviewers commenting on its themes of abuse and redemption.