Water and Blood

*Water and Blood has been a finalist by Dock Street Press and The Katherine Anne Porter Award at University of North Texas *Mass galley mailing to national and high-profile publications *Aggressive pitching for reviews, features, and interviews *Outreach to ideal audience groups and societies with which the author has connections, including the Sisters of Providence, the Irvington Historical Society, the Daughters of Charity, the Indiana Historical Society, and Indiana libraries *Promotion and mailings to independent bookstores, including the author's local indies: Indy Reads (Indianapolis, IN), The Bookstore (Frankfort, MI), Brilliant Books (Traverse City, MI), Cottage Bookstore (Glen Arbor, MI), McLean and Eakin (Petosky, MI), Leelenau Bookstore (Leland, MI), Horizon Bookstore (Traverse City, MI), and Spalding University Bookstore (Louisville, KY) *Egalleys available on Edelweiss *Major awards push *Co-op budget available

Winner of the 2020 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize In Water and Blood, the nameless narrator, a survivor of abuse, tries on other women’s stories like she is trying on their clothes. There is the nun who learns to swim decades after witnessing her biological sister’s drowning in the Ohio River. The rape victim whose deathbed statement is interwoven with the imagined voice of the rapist. The young girl who is sent to stay with her alcoholic grandfather while her parents care for a sick child. Out of scraps of reclaimed history and imagined memories, the narrator creates a garment of women’s stories for herself—overlapping the seams between fact and fiction, doing what women do: cleaning and restitching the wounds of trauma, making a life with the things that are left over after everyone else has taken what they need.