Announcing Plainwater, Our New Nonfiction Series

We are ELATED to announce that we have selected Beth Gilstrap’s There Is News Along the Ohio River and J.D. Ho’s Backyard Alchemy as the inaugural titles of PLAINWATER, our new nonfiction series! 📚💙 Both titles will be published in Spring 2026, and available at AWP Baltimore. We can’t wait for you to read these incredible collections, exploring place (Hawaii, Kentucky, Virginia), grief, migration, ecology, loss, climate change, divorce, the transformation of the self and environment, and much more. 🌊🌊

We chose Plainwater as the name for our nonfiction series because hybridity is near and dear to us as editors, and Beth and JD’s books demonstrate just this—J.D.’s essays leaning towards long-form, braided essays, and Beth’s book toward micro, nonfiction memoir. We love how differently and clearly these texts envision their narratives and explorations of the self and place in our current time of climate and social crisis.

More on Beth and JD:

Beth Gilstrap (she/her) is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina who likes to play with genre lines. She is the author of two story collections including Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press. She is also the author of the chapbook No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press & EIC/publisher of the goth/punk zine, Black Lily. Her essays, stories, and hybrids have appeared in Poets & Writers, Wigleaf, Craft, Bending Genres, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.

J.D. Ho was born by the sea, raised on a rock, schmoozed in Hollywood, drove to Austin, Texas for an MFA, and now lives among foxes and deer on a sliver of east coast green. J.D.’s work has appeared in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals./

AND just a reminder that our BROADSIDE BUNDLES are available for Corrie and Joe’s forthcoming books, which are currently AT THE PRINTER’S (this is not a drill!), and you can still snag your preorders on sale at our website bookstore.