poetry

Year in Reading – 2025

Selected 2025 Reading:

Fiction Novels/Novellas

  • Tomorrow They Won’t Dare To Murder Us by Joseph Andras
  • On the Clock by Claire Baglin
  • The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
  • In a Distant Valley by Shannon Bowring
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
  • Headshot by Rita Bullwinkle
  • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  • Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
  • Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest
  • The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
  • The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
  • Light in August by William Faulkner
  • The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne
  • Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
  • The All of It by Jeannette Haien
  • I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
  • Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
  • Orbital by Samantha Harvey
  • Sift by Alissa Hattman 
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  • The Liberators by E.J. Koh
  • The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey 
  • A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie 
  • Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie
  • Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  • Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
  • A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 
  • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  • Home by Marilynne Robinson
  • Lila by Marilynne Robinson 
  • Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson 
  • Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson 
  • The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson
  • Isle of Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
  • Coram House by Bailey Seybolt
  • The Cliffs by J Courtney Sullivan
  • The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 

Short Stories

  • Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
  • She and Her Cat: Stories by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa

Graphic Novels/Graphic Nonfiction/Graphic Memoirs

  • A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll
  • Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle 
  • Hostage by Guy Delisle
  • The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo by Joe Sacco
  • The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
  • On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Art

  • Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics edited by Russ Davidson
  • Art of the Literary Poster by Allison Rudnick
  • Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

Poetry

  • American Wake by Kerrin McCadden 
  • The End of Childhood by Wayne Miller
  • Ariel by Sylvia Plath
  • Loss and Its Antonym by Alison Prine
  • Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss 

Nonfiction

  • A Horse at Night: on Writing by Amina Cain
  • 50 Ways to Protect Book Stores by Danny Caine
  • The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
  • Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
  • Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
  • The Eighth Moon by Jennifer Kabat
  • The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story by Pagan Kennedy
  • Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
  • The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
  • Motherhood and its Ghosts by Iman Mersal
  • Cultish by Amanda Montell
  • Opacities by Sofia Samatar

Delmarva Review Anthology

The Delmarva Review has released their first anthology, a beautiful book spanning the best of sixteen years of publications. Included are two of my prose pieces: “Nursing 101,” creative nonfiction from Volume 4 (2011), and “Undertow,” a short story from Volume 6 (2013). I am so pleased to be one of the seventy-five authors selected, and the only author represented in both the nonfiction and fiction sections.

The Delmarva Review was my first literary magazine acceptance. They published my work three times while I was a nursing student in Baltimore, and I cannot overstate how supportive they were of both the work they published and of me as a writer. I learned so much just going over edits with the team. Twice they invited me to read at the Writer’s Center. I drove my battered car—the Toyota I later sold to the autobody shop to cover my outstanding repair bills—to Bethesda, and at the end of my first reading, they let me take home the extra cheese plate. I made fancy pepper jack omelettes for my classmates. I remember exactly where I was when I opened my email to find out they’d nominated me for a Pushcart Prize. Twice, they interviewed me for Writer’s Edition on Delmarva Public Radio.

On a very concrete, editorial level, The Delmarva Review helped me become a much better writer. But they also introduced me to the idea of literary community and taught me what that looked like.

All of which is to say: I am deeply grateful. Support literary magazines in general, and the Delmarva Review in particular. Buy a copy of this anthology. I’m proud to be included.