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Yoke & Feather: New Essays in November 2024


Yoke & Feather, Jessie van Eerden’s newest collection of essays, will be out with Dzanc Books on November 19, 2024. “Yoke & Feather is a sexy book, a holy book, where dream is exegesis, time is collapsed, and our bodies, ‘all mange and burr and fat deer tick,’ are not barren after all. Even the maggot-cleaned bones are good. Jessie van Eerden has the gift of writing her particulars so that they become ours.” –Mary Margaret Alvarado (American Weather and Hey Folly)

“A remarkable sweep of lodgings in time and place, from a campground in the modern-day American Southwest to the home and mind of Elizabeth in biblical Jerusalem. Van Eerden creates the collagen that connects these moments, all the while zeroing in on the miracle and the marvel of each of them, each essay exploding into its own star in this brilliant constellation of linked thought.” –Jacinda Townsend (Mother Country and Saint Monkey)


Jessie’s novel, Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, was released on March 23, 2021 and will be available in paperback October 2024. “Filled with poetry, working-class grit, and undogmatic spirituality, this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.” –John Englehardt (Bloomland)

Praise for Call It Horses:

“Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics—family, history, grief—their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace.”

Michael Parker (I Am the Light of This World and Prairie Fever)

Jessie’s collection of portrait essays, The Long Weeping, released with Orison Books in November 2017, won the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the essay category.

Praise for The Long Weeping:

“Traversing the full range of human experiences with grace, The Long Weeping insists that solace awaits on the other side of even the blackest tumult, if only it can be perceived and grasped.”

Foreword Reviews, starred review

Jessie’s second novel, My Radio Radio, was published by Vandalia Press, the creative imprint of West Virginia University Press, in 2016.

And her debut novel Glorybound  (WordFarm) won the 2012 Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize with ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards.

For the latest news on all of Jessie’s publications and readings, check the News & Events page.

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