This allows you to make a monetary contribution at an amount of your choosing. Just because you care...

Although, you're not selecting a specific reward, we'll be sending you a big thank you!

A note from our team and a small dash of swag will find its way to your mailbox. A small thank you for your generosity.

Each week, we'll add new donor rewards to our list of possibilities. Instead of selecting a book from the list available here on the day you decide to donate, let us make the selection for you. It'll be a surprise literary adventure in your mailbox!

A signed copy of Sheri Booker's debut memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Agee in an Inner-City Funeral Home.

Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. 
 
As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.

Sheri J. Booker is an award winning author, educator, and poet and television consultant. She is the author of Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She’s been featured in the NY Times, Essence Magazine, Washington Post, Baltimore Magazine, NPR and TVOne. In 2014, she graced the cover of the Baltimore Sun’s 50 Women to Watch Issue. A 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee in the category of nonfiction, Booker lives in her hometown of Baltimore and teaches at Morgan State University.

A signed copy of Stephanie Gorton's debut book of narrative nonfiction, Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America.

Tracing McClure’s from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It’s also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

“In an era newly-conscious of journalism driven by exposing wrongdoing, Citizen Reporters stands as an essential read of America’s long history with reporting on urgent matters of social justice.” — Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amity and Prosperity

Stephanie Gorton has written for The New Yorker, the Smithsonian, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, The Millions, and other publications. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh and Goucher College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her family.

A signed copy of Dinah Lenney's Coffee, part of the Object Lessons series.

Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us? 

But Coffee is about more than coffee: it's a personal history and a promise to self; in her confrontation with the hours (with time--big picture, little picture), Dinah Lenney faces head-on the challenges of growing older and carrying on.  

Coffee is part of Object Lessons, a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.  Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. 

Dinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, among them Murphy Brown’s Secretary number three, Eileen/Abraham on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a nun with a gun on Sons of Anarchy, ER’s no-nonsense Nurse Shirley, Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude (in Hamlet), and also his Lady Macbeth (of course).  She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently serves as a member of the core faculty in nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of two memoirs, The Object Parade and Bigger than Life (excerpted for the “Lives” column in The New York Times Magazine), Dinah served as a long-time nonfiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Echo Park.

A signed copy of Purvi Shah's second collection of poetry, Miracle Marks.

In her second full-length poetry collection, Miracle Marks, activist Purvi Shah investigates gender inequity and American racism through Hindu iconography and philosophy. In these searing, revelatory poems, Shah reminds us that surviving birth as an infant girl is miraculous -- as such, every girl is a miracle mark. And because education is often denied to girls, writing by women is a miracle. Through sound energy and white space, these poems chart multiple realities, including the miracles of women's labors and survivals. This collection spurs dialogue across communities and lights a way for brown girls and women who relish in spirit, intellect, politics, and justice. Catch a glimpse of the collection with two poems recently published by PEN.

Purvi Shah inspires change as a nonprofit consultant and writer. During the tenth anniversary of 9/11, she directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight Asian American voices and experiences. Her first poetry collection, Terrain Tracks, won the Many Voices Project prize, and her chaplet, Dark Lip of the Beloved: Sound Your Fiery God-Praise, explores women and being. She currently serves as a board member of The Poetry Project in New York. Her favorite art practices are her sparkly eyeshadow and raucous laughter.

A signed copy of Kristen Millares Young's debut novel Subduction, a Paris Review staff pick! 

Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie’s son Peter, who, spurred by his mother’s failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father’s murder. Claudia helps Peter’s family convey a legacy long delayed by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. 

Through the brutal and ardent collision of these two outsiders, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope to find community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disrupt – and to heal.

Kristen Millares Young is a Cuban-American novelist, investigative journalist, and co-founder of Investigate West. She currently freelances from the Pacific Northwest for the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times. Kristen was the only non-staffer on the Pulitzer Prize winning team that produced "SnowFall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" for the New York Times. Her personal essays have been anthologized in Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity and Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze, a NYTimes New & Notable. Young was a 2010 multimedia reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a 2010-2012 GO-MAP Fellow at the University of Washington, where she earned her MFA. Her debut novel SUBDUCTION is a lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas. Young is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle.

An essay or chapter review | Valid from 08/01/2020 - 12/31/2020.

Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. 
 
As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.

About Sheri Booker | Booker is an award winning author, educator, and poet and television consultant. She is the author of Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She’s been featured in the NY Times, Essence Magazine, Washington Post, Baltimore Magazine, NPR and TVOne. In 2014, she graced the cover of the Baltimore Sun’s 50 Women to Watch Issue. A 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee in the category of nonfiction, Booker lives in her hometown of Baltimore and teaches at Morgan State University.

An essay or chapter review by narrative nonfiction author and editor Stephanie Gorton.

Stephanie Gorton has written for The New Yorker, the Smithsonian, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, The Millions, and other publications. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh and Goucher College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her family.

Essay Review | Valid from 08/01/2020 - 12/31/2020.

About Kelly Sundberg | Sundberg is an assistant professor in creative writing at Ashland University and author of the memoir Goodbye, Sweet Girl.

Sundberg's essays have appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, Slice, and others. Her essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2015, and other essays have been listed as notables in the same series.  She has a PhD in creative nonfiction from Ohio University and has been the recipient of fellowships or grants from Vermont Studio Center, A Room of Her Own Foundation, Dickinson House, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

In Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival, Kelly Sundberg tells the story of how she ended up in an abusive marriage, why she stayed for as long as she did, and why she eventually left. Along the way, she looked to her childhood in Salmon, Idaho, a small, isolated mountain community, which like her marriage, was a place of deep contradictions, and a place of magical beauty riven by secret brutality. Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a story of trauma, but it’s also a story of love, community, and hope.

The Art of Time | This online workshop is capped at 5 participants.

Workshop Description |  Without the passage of time, there is no story. But there are many ways to organize, steer, and structure time in essays and memoirs. How do you write an essay that covers one hour? One day? Twenty years? How do you handle flashbacks, or multiple timelines? During this course, you will learn many of the ways that a writer can conceptualize the time frame of a story, manage time, or even slow or speed up time to suit the story you want to tell. Writing prompts, readings, and discussion will help you become more skilled in using time and structure. 

Workshop Date | The date for this half-day workshop will be determined based on participant availability. This will include four-hours of teaching time with breaks for exercises so, overall, this is a six-hour workshop. Once all five participants have been identified, Haworth will survey the group with a range of availability.

About Kevin Haworth | Haworth is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing and the author of five books: the novel The Discontinuity of Small Things; the essay collections Famous Drownings in Literary History and Far Out All My Life; a collection of essays about writing, Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, co-edited with Dinty W. Moore; and most recently, the Eisner-nominated Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets, a book-length study of Israel’s most famous comics artist.

Formerly the Executive Editor of Ohio University Press & Swallow Press, he has taught at Arizona State University, Ohio University, Tel Aviv University, and Carlow University. He now teaches writing and literature at Carnegie Mellon University and lives the Squirrel Hill neighborhood with his family.

Fiction or Nonfiction Manuscript Review & Revision Review | Valid from 08/01/2020 to 07/31/2021.

This is a three-step process: Haworth will read your fiction or nonfiction manuscript and send written feedback in the form of an editorial letter (a Zoom call is optional at this stage). Within 6-months, Haworth will accept and review a revised copy of your manuscript. He will share his feedback with you over Zoom.

About Kevin Haworth | Haworth is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing and the author of five books: the novel The Discontinuity of Small Things; the essay collections Famous Drownings in Literary History and Far Out All My Life; a collection of essays about writing, Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, co-edited with Dinty W. Moore; and most recently, the Eisner-nominated Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets, a book-length study of Israel’s most famous comics artist.

Formerly the Executive Editor of Ohio University Press & Swallow Press, he has taught at Arizona State University, Ohio University, Tel Aviv University, and Carlow University. He now teaches writing and literature at Carnegie Mellon University and lives the Squirrel Hill neighborhood with his family.