Books by Delaware Regional Authors 5

At 10, Betsy Toppin's life was going fine until the day a Family Court judge ordered her to leave Mama Cope, her foster mother—the only parent she had known—and live with strangers: her biological parents. Before she was able to understand what it all meant she had gone from being safe and loved to unsafe and unloved, and middle class Catholic to lower class Protestant: none of which pleased her. But the heart of Blood Sisters is not the abuse she endured as the result of one bad decision made by one rushed judge. It is the power of sisterhood. It is the story of how Bootsie, a tomboy and their father’s favorite, willingly gave up her favored place in the family to protect Betsy—the sister she never knew she had—from their father’s demons. And how, together, they learned to never give up hope, no matter what.

A collection of poetry and prose related to Southern Delaware, with works by Rich Barnett, Julianna Baggott, Alexander Long, Gerry LaFemina, Mary Pauer, Devon Miller-Duggan, Susan Towers, Gail Comorat, Maggie Rowe, Sherry Chappelle, Irene Fick, Darcy Mozer, Karen Hurley-Heyman, Will Reader, Ethan Joella, Alexis Weber, Wendy Ingersoll, Terry Plowman, Vanessa Haley, Anne Colwell, Jack Clemons, William Claire, Jeanne Murray Walker, George R. Merrill, Michael Blaine, e. jean lanyon, Hina Haq, Richard Peabody, Frank Giampietro, Denise Duhamel, Pati Nash, Fleda Brown, Billie Travalini, Francis Minni, Margorie Miller, JoAnn Balingit, James O’Neill Miller, Sue Ellen Thompson, Tom Horton, Gary Hanna, and Denise Clemons.

An anthology of writing and art by students served by the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth, and their families. Starting with the idea that adjudicated youth, 12 to 18, never receive the traditional yearbook to celebrate their accomplishments, it quickly became evident as the students submitted their poems, stories and artwork that this would be more than a yearbook. The editor and her team set a new goal: to develop a practical pedagogical approach, designing lesson plans using the students' own work, with the hope that the resulting canon would give students a sense of achievement and be viewed by others as a work of beauty and service.

In the first collection of its kind, the editors have gathered together fifty-two of the best poems, stories, memoirs, novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction by writers who have called the tiny state of Delaware their home. The volume offers meticulously selected work, alphabetized by author, much of it inspired by or set in the state, and all in a wide range of styles. The anthology is not limited to writers currently living in Delaware; rather, it ranges far beyond, including major writers such as Gibbons Ruark, McKay Jenkins, Julianna Baggott, Fleda Brown, Allison Funk, and Pulitzer Prize winner W. D. Snodgrass_writers who were originally from Delaware, or who lived in the state long enough for their work to have been influenced by its streets, its beaches, and its winding marshland waterways. The anthology includes substantial biographies of each author.

Fleda Brown served as Poet Laureate of Delaware 2001-2007

Any one poem in Fleda Brown's eighth collection may touch on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, the nature of poetry, and the nature of reality. There are sonnets for all ten grandchildren written by a grandmother, poems about the Big Bang, about child labor, the moon over Paris, and tent caterpillars, all written with humility, humor, curiosity, and a deep love of life.

The dead seem like holes in the universe, / each a random fuzz-spot, a sad little purse.

Fleda Brown's awards include the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.

Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, both poets laureate of their states and both nationally recognized writers who’ve given their lives to their art, have conspired to write an unusual book of essays on a wide variety of topics, covering a lot of territory, both artistic and memoiristic. Some of the pieces, like “Wild Animals,” are downright silly; some, like “Sex, “Music,” and “Food,” are provocative; some, like “Clothes,” “Sports,” and “Houses,” appear ordinary but are ultimately revealing. The last pair of essays fall under the rubric, “Becoming a Poet,” but actually, the whole collection is about Syd and Fleda as people-poets. Poet-people. Poetry never completely goes off-stage in this wide-ranging and exciting conversation between the two.

All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet’s gift, into something more. This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman’s story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times.

"What a remarkable collection! Fleda Brown has turned obsession into a series of finely wrought evocations of a period. She knows her music, and she knows that her early stirrings in relation to it were emblematic of a nation's. There's consistently high quality of phrasing in this book, and an astute framing of effects. Which is to say Fleda Brown has been able to raise popular culture into art like few others before her." (Stephen Dunn)

The poet explains the origin of the poetry books unusual title: "A sure way to catch catfish and other bottom-feeders is to squeeze a ball of partially dried cow's blood around a hook. The blood dissolves slowly, spreading its tendrils of odor into the surrounding water. It's like the tight wad of blood relations out of which I keep flinging myself and my words, both to lure whatever is out there and to assure myself of how tightly I'm hooked to the center."

Including a work by Cookie Ohlson, these forty-eight powerful stories and poems etch in vivid detail the breakthrough moments experienced by women during the life-changing era that was the ’60s and ’70s. These women rode the sexual revolution with newfound freedom, struggled for identity in divorce courts and boardrooms, and took political action in street marches. They pushed through boundaries, trampled taboos, and felt the pain and joy of new experiences. And finally, here, they tell it like it was.

From Vietnam to France, from Chile to England, from the Haight-Ashbury to Greenwich Village, and to the Deep South and Midwest, Times They Were A-Changing recalls the cultural reverberations that reached into farm kitchens and city “pads” alike—and in doing so, it celebrates the women of the ’60s and ’70s, reminding them of the importance of their legacy.

Five Bridges is a literary anthology by a group of published and award-winning Delaware authors, The TransCanal Writers. Their anthology is a collection of poetry, a short story and an essay. Photographs of the bridges were provided by local photographer, Gordon Hesse. The five chapters that make up the anthology are each named for a bridge along the canal that connects the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. A theme was assigned to each bridge: The Reedy Point Bridge, Muddy Waters; St. George’s Bridge, Rough Waters; Roth Bridge, Undertow; Summit Bridge, Smooth Sailing; Chesapeake City Bridge, Against the Tide. Included are Cookie Oh

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(CreateSpace, 2015) A Collection of Dance Poems is a selection of poems that are dance themed or referenced to dance. These poems are written by both members of the community and poets of the past—such as John Keats, Lord Byron, and Arthur Symons. This collection is a wonderful coffee-table book for all ages.

A Collection of Dance Poems, contributing editor, Johnny M. Tucker

inda Evans, Arlene Humphrey, Nina Bennett, and Johnny M. Tucker, Jr.

Delaware Poet Laureate from 1976 to 2001 and plein aire artist of Pea Patch island, e. jean is a Delaware institution. This 1979 classic reflects the age of the push for an Equal Rights Amendment and of a mother and artist struggling in those backward times. With collage and poetry, e. jean shows why she lasted longer than any other poet laureate in Delaware history. Read a review of her art in the Broken Turtle Blog. You can order copies of her work by contacting her directly: Lanyon Studio, 8 Winston Ave., Wilmington, DE 19805.

These editorial musings by the muttering marsupials of e. jean's garage have come out on occasion since 2004. You can the get the latest editions by contacting e. jean directly: Lanyon Studio, 8 Winston Ave., Wilmington, DE 19804.

“This dark, ambitious narrative full of voices, echoes and whispers of anguish is deftly plotted and carefully crafted. Here is a challenging poetry of action and remembrance and the sheer, downright, daily human grotesque. But it is also a poetic sequence that does something altogether more difficult: it holds our interest and its own lyric balance at one and the same time. It compels the sort of music from pain which is hard to forget.”—Eavan Boland