One of Henry Holt's lead titles for the fall of 2009 will be Rhoda Janzen's memoir entitled Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home. It's already made Publishers' Weekly, and it's being blurbed by the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert and Cynthia Kaplan.
Stay tuned to the CMW news blog for more on this book in the coming year.
Rhoda Janzen is an Associate Professor of English at Hope College, where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She lives in Allegan, Michigan. She is the author of Babel's Stair , a book of poems.
http://www.word-press.com/janzen.html
Rhoda Janzen's exquisitely crafted formal poems take us on a romp through language that draws on the resources of her strict Mennonite upbringing with its earthy low-German oral tradition and biblical cadences--'the lake of language in which I learned to swim'--as well as the refinements of her worldly experience as a fashion model and scholar where 'words are classmates, tipsy/at a reunion.'
--Ann Hostetler, from the back cover of Babel's Stair
Kay
Keep an ear out, too, for the audio edition coming out at the same time from HighBridge Audio. (highbridgeaudio.com)
Gayle
Gah. Don't bother. It's not funny and it's way too self-absorbed. I know, I know, it's a memoir, it's supposed to be self-absorbed, but it has the tone of a teenager who just knows that she's cool and her family isn't so it's okay to make fun of them. It's not that well-written and what thin charm it has is gone by Chapter 3. I had high hopes and was very disappointed.