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Welcome Lois Baer Barr

photo by Ed Levin

We’re excited that novelist Lois Baer Barr has joined the Water’s Edge Press team. Her novel The Tailor’s Daughter, based on her mother’s experiences growing up in Louisville, KY between the two world wars, is a beautiful story of one family’s grit and determination to make their way in a United States not always welcoming of Jewish immigrants.

Projected publication is late fall 2023.

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch and so you’re the first to know about Lois’s novel. Sign up form is at the bottom of this page.

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Welcome Marilyn Zelke Windau

Marilyn Zelke Windau’s name is well known in Wisconsin. As an established poet, she’s published numerous collections. Her poems arise from lived experience with nature, her work as a master gardener and former art teacher, and her family. She’s a docent in reality at her local art museum, but in her upcoming book Beneath the Southern Crux, Zelke Windau is our guide through art of another kind, the wonders of the southern hemisphere: seas, mountains, ruins, and above all, resilient human life and culture in landscapes that are at once beautiful and formidable.

Beneath the Southern Crux is due out in spring of 2023. While you wait, you can find her work in two anthologies from Water’s Edge Press: The Water Poems and The Aging Poems.

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Welcome Lisa Vihos, author of The Lone Snake

We’re happy to announce that we will publish The Lone Snake: The Story of Sofonisba Anguissola.

The novel captures the life of Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola using real and invented characters and a fictive memoir that brings readers into the artist’s intimate life. Vihos’ portrait of life in the 16th century is a rich tapestry that blends art history, romance, and verse to tell a timeless tale of what it means to create.

Read the full description and advance praise for this stunning debut novel.

Vihos is not new to Water’s Edge Press. She co-edited the poetry anthology From Everywhere a Little: A Migration Anthology. She’s also a contributor to The Aging Poems. The Lone Snake is her first novel. Read more about her on our Author’s page or at lisavihos.com.

The medallion image on the cover is licensed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Welcome poet Kathleen Serley to Water’s Edge Press

We’re excited to announce that Kathleen Serley’s collection of poems, Statements Made in Passing, will be released by Water’s Edge Press in the spring of 2022. The poems arise out of the poet’s sharp observation of people and things near her own door.

Kathleen Serley, a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, is a lifelong Wisconsin resident, enjoys the way retirement has opened her days to poetry. Her poems have been published in The Solitary Plover, Volga River Review, Verse Wisconsin, Red Cedar and Verse and Vision where she won an Artists’ Choice Award.

Stay tuned for more about this book in the coming months. If you are not yet subscribed to our newsletter, please fill in the subscription form today. That way, you’re never out of the loop.

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Silver Medalist: The Distance Between Stars by Jeff Elzinga

There are no Midwest literary Olympics, but if there were, Jeff Elzinga would be on the medal stand. His novel, The Distance Between Stars, was a 2021 finalist for literary fiction from Midwest Independent Publishers Association, and now we proudly display his well-earned bling on the cover.

Order your copy with silver award seal today.

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The Velocity of Love recognized by Wisconsin Library Association for outstanding achievement

The Wisconsin Library Association (WLA) has selected The Velocity of Love by Kathryn Gahl for Outstanding Achievement for 2021. See the full list of poets and fiction writers selected by WLA for recognition for books published in the past year.

Congratulations Kathryn!

Buy this book

Read the Reviews

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Daniel Smith’s Ancestral featured in the news

Poetry captures sorrow and fallout of farm crisis

by Barry Adams, Wisconsin State Journal


Daniel Smith is featured in the Sunday, July 18, 2021 edition of the Wisconsin State Journal. Barry Adams interviewed Smith at his home near Arena, Wisconsin.

In Ancestral, from Water’s Edge Press, Smith draws on his decades of farming and his experiences as a farm financial counselor in Wisconsin. Many of the poems express the anguish people feel when they realize they can no longer sustain the family farm. Yet Smith’s poetry goes beyond such stories and reveals his deep and enduring connection to the land.

From the article: 

“It bothers me a lot,” Smith said. “The economic,social and cultural impacts of farming are very complex. I think going through all of that and having experienced the emotional turbulence of that really helped me write about it and writing helped me deal with it.”

Read the article and listen to Dan read “Dry Dirt,” a poem from Ancestral. [Permalink]