Pitt Grad and Lambda Award-Winning Author Julie Marie Wade visits Riverstone with her lyric essay collection, OTHERWISE, winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book
“I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet,” writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author’s self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 16 volumes of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the lyric essay collection, Otherwise, selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and a recipient of grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Julie has taught in the creative writing program at Florida International University since 2012. She lives with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.
Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, a visual artist, and a numbers person. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, selected by Cheryl Strayed as the winner of a Kore Press Memoir Award and featured in NPR’s 2021 Books We Love. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and is the recipient of a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Fellowship. Candace grew up in the woodsy marshlands of Southern Connecticut and lived in Providence, Rhode Island and Portland, Oregon, before landing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, writer Patrick McGinty, and their son.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays appear in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, and The New York Times. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Before teaching at the university level, she taught middle and high school English in San Francisco. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.