I first met Sara Northerner when I began my coursework in the PhD in Humanities program at the University of Louisville in August 2008.  Sara was in her fourth year of the program at that time, having already completed coursework and nearing completion of her comprehensive exams.

Jill Bialosky’s History of a Suicide: my sister’s unfinished life made Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2011 top ten memoirs and biographies.

Prevallet’s collection of poems, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Times, begins with a Preface that sets the reader up with an expository narrative (in prose blocks) of the tragic suicide of the author’s father.

For a book of 32 pages, Rauk writes with truly impressive variety and breadth. She experiments with a range of forms, from prose poems to short meditations, and incorporates subjects as varied as the number of spiders one is likely to swallow while sleeping to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey.

Brian Teare is a kind soul. The inscription in my book, Pleasure, (we briefly/barely spoke twice) reads: “2.4.11 AWP… for Sarah—we’ll talk more—in the mean time: w/ pleasure & respect for your quest/ions—As ever, B—”

High school can be quite a vicious environment in which to spend one’s teenage years, especially for those who fall even slightly outside of the norm.