It’s Pub Day!

DURHAM, N.C. — River River Books is delighted to announce the January 23, 2024, release of two much-anticipated first books: Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman and A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira.

Both of these books are deeply felt explorations of place and belonging. Edelman’s collection directly addresses Memphis, Tennessee, asking essential questions about home, identity, and generational legacies for a Jewish family living in the American South. Ferreira offers a collection of poems that take on distances both vast and small, literal and metaphorical, rooted in Newark, New Jersey, and in Portugal.

Both collections are available for order at the River River Books website, along with our 2023 books by Lauren Camp and Jennifer A Sutherland.

If you are interested in a digital copy for review, contact the editors via email: [email protected].

About the poets:

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee, who writes into diasporic living. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools.

Carla Sofia Ferreira is a poet and teacher from Newark, New Jersey. She is author of the micro-chapbook Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press 2019). One of three students selected to write a creative thesis in poetry during her senior year at Harvard College, Ferreira holds graduate degrees in English and education from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University, respectively. She is the daughter of Portuguese immigrants, and her work as an English teacher continues to inform and nourish her writing as a practice of community and care.

About the press:

River River Books was founded in March 2022 by Amorak Huey and Han VanderHart. Dear Memphis and A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us are the 2024 entries in this new press’s growing catalog of single-author poetry collections.

River River Books will be at AWP! The annual conference and book fair is Feb. 7-10 in Kansas City, Missouri. Come see us at Table 1202.