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Lena Mahmoud

A touching debut novel chronicling the life a young Palestinian American woman between two cultures as she comes of age and as she settles into marriage.

Isra Shadi, a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed Palestinian and White descent, lives in California with her paternal amu (uncle), amtu (aunt), and cousins after the death of her mother and abandonment by her father at a young age. Ever the outcast in her amu and amtu’s household, Isra is encouraged to marry and leave. After rejecting a string of undesirable suitors, she marries Yusef, an old love from her past . . .

In Amreekiya, author Lena Mahmoud deftly juggles two storylines, alternating between Isra’s youth and her current life as a married twentysomething who is torn between cultures and trying to define herself. The chapters chronicle various moments in Isra’s narrative, including her parents volatile relationship and the trials and joys of forging a partnership with Yusef. Mahmoud also examines Isra’s first visit to Palestine, the effects of sexism, how language affects identity, and what it means to have a love that overcomes unbearable pain.

An exploration of womanhood from an underrepresented voice in American literature, Amreekiya is simultaneously unique and relatable. Featuring an authentic array of characters, Mahmoud’s first novel is a much-needed story in a divided world.

Praise for Amreekiya

“A subversive story about love and marriage . . . a feminist Palestinian project that follows its headstrong lead, Isra, through struggle and loss. This is a tense examination of what a marriage is and how gendered expectations influence love and family. It is an intimate dissection of a relationship that exists in an unequal world . . . . Mahmoud portrays the unsettling conflict between freedom and social imprisonment in Amreekiya, an unnerving novel that encourages questioning common assumptions, no matter how deep down they rest.” —Foreword Reviews

“Both wise and humorous, Mahmoud’s debut novel is an intimate portrayal of an early Arab American marriage, filled with passion, loss, and ultimately forgiveness. Readers will be moved by the fierce but fragile Isra, who refuses to be defined by her family, her husband, and her society.” —Susan Muaddi Darraj, author of A Curious Land: Stories from Home

“Yusef and Isra’s story is relevant for people worldwide. With poignant, beautiful writing, Mahmoud quickly draws readers into the novel, portraying all her characters with a sympathetic voice. A fantastic choice for book discussions and well worth a second reading.” —Library Journal (starred review)

The University Press of Kentucky

University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series

Amreekiya: A Novel

Katie Cortese

In this short story collection, girls and women tackle complex forms of love and desire as they explore the world.

A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer—who is, in turn, attracted to her mother—leaving her “inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts.”

In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring female narrators that range in age from five to forty, the narratives in Make Way for Her speak to the many challenges and often bittersweet rewards of offering, receiving, and returning love as imperfect human beings. The stories are united by the theme of desperate love, whether it’s a daughter’s love for a parent, a sister’s for a sibling, or a romantic love that is sometimes returned and sometimes unrequited.

Cortese’s complex and multilayered stories play with the reader’s own desires and anticipations as her characters stubbornly resist the expected. The intrepid girls and women in this book are, above all, explorers. They drive classic cars from Maine to Phoenix, board airplanes for the first time, and hike dense forests in search of adventure; but what they often find is that the most treacherous landscapes lie within. As a result, Make Way for Her explores a world of women who crave knowledge and experience, not simply sex or love.

Praise for Make Way for Her

“Cortese (Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories, 2015) tells stories of young women on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to understand the social world . . . . A welcome addition to the burgeoning canon of finely wrought female stories.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Offers enticing glimpses of curiously compact, womencentric fictional universes, generally focused on girls, teenagers, women, and the men who affect?but not necessarily impact?their lives. Cortese’s writing is smoothly compelling and adapts from voice to voice.” —Foreword Reviews

“Heartening, and unusually thoughtful, this collection of stories places the young women, their feelings and minds (not just their bodies) at the center.” —Crystal Wilkinson, recipient of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for The Birds of Opulence

“This collection is not about understanding our young people. It’s about living and breathing inside their bodies and heads. Salinger can step aside now. Make way for Katie Cortese!” —Dennis Covington, author of Salvation on Sand Mountain

Make Way for Her: & Other Stories

Brianna Noll

A debut collection of poetry combining the scientific and the fantastic with Japanese culture.

 A honeycomb long vacated by honeybees still possesses an “echo of the swarm, / a lingering song.” Living things are made and make themselves: “My bones came first. / Like long needles, / they knitted muscle / and tendon / and tissue and skin. / Filled themselves / with marrow.”

 In her debut collection, Brianna Noll fuses the scientific and fantastic, posing probing questions that explore the paradoxes of experience. Interweaving themes of creation, art, and nature, the poet gives voice to animate and inanimate figures such as woolly mammoths, star-nosed moles, cells, mylar balloons, and puzzle boxes. Her vivid poems obscure the line between what is literal and what is figurative. The result is alchemic and ethereal—each verse intricately layered with sharp observation as well as emotional and intellectual exploration and questioning.

 Collectively, the poems draw significantly on Japanese culture and language in their imagery, with cultural nuances and implications embedded in words and expressions. They tend to be tied, not to subjects, but to ways of seeing and considering the world. Noll’s lyrical voice reflects a curious and imaginative approach that results in tight poems, typically enjambed, which build together into a thoughtful collection. Her work offers ways of seeing and considering the world that exceed our lived experience, begging the reader to consider how far we are willing to go when faced with roadblocks, doubts, and uncertainties.

Named one of the best books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books

 Praise for The Price of Scarlet

 “Brianna Noll’s vivid, haunting collection contains poetry wide-ranging and deep, with a brilliance reminiscent of Marianne Moore, and a similar interest in creation.” ―Lisa Williams, author of Women Reading to the Sea and Gazelle in the House

 "Brianna Noll is on the find-out committee. Like an Emily Dickinson for the twenty-first century, she rules out nothing. These quiet, powerful poems tells us that the world is connected, that all we need to see those connections is what Noll has in abundance: openness, patience, and an eye for beauty.” ―David Kirby, author of Get Up, Please

 “The Price of Scarlet doesn’t sneak up on the reader as much as it swallows the reader whole, pushes us out at the other end, more erudite than upon entrance. There’s a certainty in every poem, whether she is investigating the nature of the wind or invoking the Kraken from the deep. This is a remarkable first book of poems. From the first poem to the last these solid poems feel polished to a fine gloss. Read The Price of Scarlet, it will intoxicate you.” ―Today's Book of Poetry

The Price of Scarlet: Poems