Karen Salyer McElmurray writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. Her memoir, Surrendered Child, won the AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction and was listed as a “notable book” by the National Book Critics Circle. She is also the author of The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick from Oxford American, and a Lit Life Book of the Year; Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (University of Georgia Press), a novel that won the Lillie Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing; the anthology Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, co-edited with Adrian Blevins, from Ohio University Press, and the novel Wanting Radiance published in 2020 by South Limestone/University of Kentucky Press. Her essays have won the Annie Dillard Prize, the New Southerner Prize, the Orison Magazine Anthology Award and have several times been Notable in Best American Essays.

Karen Salyer McElmurray’s sixth book and first essay collection, Voice Lessons, was published by Iris Press on May 14. It’s a collection about, as she says, voice: that wicked and terrible bloom of ourselves. McElmurray tells me that this book was similar to the birthing process. The lesson of this book, she says, is that she has become ready to open up to other things. She was ready to publish the collection and the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Then, both of her parents died. All of these waves of pain make it into the collection, which explores the concept of home as not a place, but a feeling. An understanding. (more…)

— 1 week ago