"Poet, memoirist, fiction writer, and critic Cherry has assembled a lissome and winning retrospective collection of essays on writing, reading, and life….Piquant essays on family history and her coming-of-age are deepened by reflections on beauty, art, and vocation. In fresh and inquiring portraits of exceptional southern women writers––Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Ward Brown, Bobbie Ann Mason—Cherry explores the nature of a literary life."

— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

— Library Journal

Though at first the title appealed to the bookworm in me, this gorgeous collection of essays is full of stunning articulations about the writer’s relationship to writing (which changes as the political climate changes), to other women writers (from those who inspire to those who provoke), to the varied encounters and revelations that shape an artist’s education. Cherry’s own writing is so honest and unpretentious, so level-headed and curious, that it offers what it set out to do: create a portrait of the imagination.

—Rigoberto González, Critical Mass

Cherry's book is a treasure for writers, would-be writers, and informed readers.

—Pleaides

Read/Hear the Review on Alabama Public Radio

Read the Interview in Pif Magazine

Read the Review in The Pitch Blog

Read the Review on Peony Moon Blog

Read the Review in Read Southside Virginia Blog

Kelly Cherry is the author of nineteen books of poetry, novels, short stories, criticism, and memoir—including this year’s Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life and The Retreats of Thought: Poems—eight chapbooks, and two translations of classical plays. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and her collection The Society of Friends: Stories received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award in 2000 for the best short story collection of 1999. For her body of work in poetry she has received the Hanes Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has held named chairs and distinguished visiting writer positions at a number of universities. She and her husband, Burke Davis III, live on a small farm in Virginia with their two dogs.

Catalogue | Poetry | Fiction | Nonfiction/Drama | Chapbooks | Coming Soon | Ordering