Cover Reveal: There Is News Along the Ohio River by Beth Gilstrap

January 30, 2026

There Is News Along the Ohio River, Design by Alban Fischer

We are so excited to share with you the first cover of our two inaugural titles in our Plainwater Nonfiction Series: There Is News Along the Ohio River, by Beth Gilstrap! This cover captures the simultaneously sweeping and daily introspection of Beth’s micro nonfiction collection. You are sure to fall in love with these vignettes of the Ohio River, bridge walking, and daily living—read on for an excerpt and praise from three stellar writers we are huge fans of here at River River Books: Heather Bell Adams, Chloe N. Clark, and Violeta Garcia-Mendoza! Preorders are also now open, and there has never been a better time to show some small press love.

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.

Beth Gilstrap

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There is news along the Ohio River: you have moved five-hundred miles from the only home you’ve ever known. The sky feels bigger here but that’s the lack of canopy, the way the land is bisected by her, how the bridges span rusted bright, shadows on the current.

 

There is news along the Ohio River: these are extraordinary days here when the late summer light shifts Faulknerian and monarchs alight on the spans of the Big Four Bridge.

 

You have come to call her Mama, this water. Today she is high and rising still, ornery in the midday sun, carrying trees that stood tall and reaching for five of your lifetimes to their final destinations.

Beth Gilstrap
“There is News Along the Ohio River is a mesmerizing collection about sore hearts, tangled minds, and the art of noticing the natural world. Dreamlike and haunting, these pieces invite us in with sharp details and astonish us with their turns, lingering long after the book is closed, shining with hard-fought truths.” Heather Bell Adams, author of MARANATHA ROAD
“In There Is News Along the Ohio River, a series of short glimpses reveal the people and the place so deeply that every snippet feels like a novel. In orange sneakers and baked beans and yellow roses, tiny details become windows into the world. This is a tender and beautifully written work, and Gilstrap finds such kindness for humanity that the book feels like the guide we all need right now.” Chloe N. Clark, author of EVERY GALAXY A CIRCLE
“In Beth Gilstrap’s There Is News Along the Ohio River, daily walks along the Ohio’s ‘borderland of metal, earth, and water’ become essential acts of survival. The speaker at a brink, the country at a brink, the river reveals herself as mother, refuge, witness, and tether. This collection speaks to the ‘pocket between rib and collarbone where so much trauma lives’; which is to say, it speaks vulnerability and tenderness from one who knows. I loved Gilstrap’s genre-fluid lyric forms and was profoundly moved by her deep attention to place and psyche.”  Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, author of SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND

We are gearing up to see y’all at AWP, Baltimore in March and can’t wait! Oue table will be brimming with seven new books (five poetry, and our two new nonfiction, including There Is News Along the Ohio River!), and we’d love for you to come say hi.

Stay warm, keep your ICE whistle close, support your neighbors, y’all <3

Han & Amorak

River River Books