Contact: Taylor Schaefer
Stillhouse Press Media & Marketing
publicity@stillhousepress.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 18, 2024
STILLHOUSE PRESS TO PUBLISH LEAFSKIN, DEBUT NOVEL FROM MIRANDA SCHMIDT: AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER NOW
FAIRFAX, VA (October 18, 2024) – Stillhouse Press announces the publication of Leafskin, an intimate exploration of queer family-making and environmental upheaval from debut author Miranda Schmidt, to be released on March 25, 2025.
Leafskin is a novel of liminal spaces for anyone who has found themselves searching for connection between binaries: life and art, prose and poetry, body and nature, reality and magic. As Callum Angus, author of A Natural History of Transition, says, “It's into these intricate webs of relation that Leafskin settles like love, always shifting with the light.”
A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments amid a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities.
An exploration of queer parenthood, love, and identity, Leafskin embraces the uncanny entanglements that root through Jo's life and her work to, as Maya Sonenburg (Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters) says, “probe what it means to make something grow in this time of…destruction: a tree, a marriage, a poem, a painting, a friendship, a child.” Leafskin interrogates how we create and what we become in a time of environmental devastation.
Leafskin is available now for preorder exclusively from Stillhouse Press: https://www.stillhousepress.org/stillhouse-store/leafskin
Miranda Schmidt’s (they/she) work circles the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Their writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, Phoebe, and more. They have received support from the Lambda Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and the Bread Loaf Environmental Conference and taught creative writing at the Portland Book Festival, the Loft, the University of Washington, and Portland Community College. They are a PhD candidate at Bath Spa University and received their MFA from the University of Washington. Originally from the Midwest, Miranda now lives in Portland, Oregon. Leafskin (Stillhouse Press) is Miranda’s debut novel.
--------------------------------------
STILLHOUSE PRESS is an independent book publisher based in Northern Virginia. We publish surprising, gutsy fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that can’t or doesn’t want to find a home in big publishing. We are drawn to the strange, the unconventional, the transcendent, the risky. We’re looking for work that pushes boundaries.
By way of our relationship with George Mason University’s MFA, MA, BFA, and BA programs, our aim is to provide educational opportunity through applied experience in the art of craft publishing – student staff are responsible for acquiring, producing, and marketing work from independent authors in the course of their professional education, allowing them to forge lasting professional relationships and step out with confidence into the greater literary community.
