SMALL PRESS POWER: ESSAYS, MEMOIR & TRUTH-TELLING

These books center lived experience as literature…not confession, not performance, but rigorous, embodied truth-telling. They interrogate identity, place, desire, and survival with clarity and force.

BOOKS INCLUDED

Dream Pop Origami by Jackson Bliss

DREAM POP ORIGAMI: A PERMUTATIONAL MEMOIR ABOUT HAPA IDENTITY is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice.

Piecework: Ethnographies of Place by Amy Shimshon-Santo

Piecework is a lively collection of intergenerational essays on how people create possibility and place through the arts, culture, and heritage. Women and children play central roles in these ethnographies and autoethnographies. Their stories and struggles, ideas and breakthroughs, affirm the exponential power of families, schools, and communities to shape their own destinies through creative action. We learn that change is a collective endeavor, shaped on the ground, with the people we know and the communities we cherish.

I Bought My Husband’s Mistress Lingerie by Stacey Freeman

Stacey Freeman had no idea what she was in for when she looked inside her husband’s suitcase, but what she found would change the course of her life and her children’s forever. Set in Short Hills, New Jersey, I BOUGHT MY HUSBAND’S MISTRESS LINGERIE tells the relatable story of a woman once happily married to her high school sweetheart who had watched her marriage slowly deteriorate without seeing the reality around her. But the moment she did and realized divorce and full physical custody of her three young children were imminent, she had no choice but to re-evaluate her life, her goals, and her definition of success.