Join us on Wednesday, August 23 for a joint author event: Kay Cosgrove reads from her book of poetry Anybody Home? and Ashley Wurzbacher reads from her debut novel How to Care for a Human Girl.
About the Books
Anybody Home?
The poems in Kay Cosgrove's first collection are driven by curiosity – about herself, the world, and her place in it. Witty and elegantly restrained, they ask the question: how do we live the lives we’ve made for ourselves? Cosgrove roams from barrooms to checkout lines to the enigma of motherhood; she is a teenager responsible for a sack-of-flour-as-a-baby, and then an adult driving a teenage babysitter home. She explores the texture of our connections to strangers, family, ourselves, and illuminates the sublime in the unimportant. The poems in Anybody Home? embrace life’s sweetness and shadows. Here, the ordinary is unfathomable and the ineffable is ordinary.
How to Care for a Human Girl
From “a writer at the top of her game” (The New York Times) comes a bighearted and sharply funny debut novel about two estranged sisters and the crossroads they face after becoming unexpectedly pregnant at the same time.
Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.
Although Maddy still hasn’t forgiven Jada for a terrible betrayal, she goes to her for support, only to discover the cracks in the façade of her sister’s seemingly perfect life. As their past resentments boil over, the sisters must navigate the consequences of their choices and determine how best to care for themselves and each other.
With luminous prose and laser-sharp psychological insight, How to Care for a Human Girl is a compassionate and unforgettable examination of the complexities of choice, the special intimacy of sisterhood, and the bizarre ways our heated political moment manifests in daily life.
About the Authors
Kay Cosgrove is the recipient of awards from The Academy of American Poets, Inprint Houston, and The Westchester Review. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review and The American Poetry Review, among other journals. She holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Pennsylvania with her family.
Ashley Wurzbacher’s novel, How to Care for a Human Girl, is forthcoming from Atria Books on August 8, 2023. Her debut short story collection, Happy Like This, won the 2019 John Simmons (Iowa) Short Fiction Award, selected by Carmen Maria Machado, and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Ashley’s short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She earned her MFA from Eastern Washington University and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Originally from Titusville, Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo.