Please join MWPA and the Portland Public Library for an online conversation with award-winning writers Jim Nichols and Monica Wood to celebrate their new books. Nichols’ latest novel, Blue Summer, was just published by Islandport Books. Wood’s classic collection of linked stories, Ernie’s Ark, is being published by Godine in a new edition that includes a never-before published story by Monica Wood and an afterword by the author.
To RSVP for this free event and receive a link to the event on Zoom, please go here.
To order a copy of Blue Summer or Ernie’s Ark: The Abbott Falls Stories, please contact the Book Review in Falmouth, our bookstore partner for this event. You can order by phone (207) 781-4808 or send them an email at bookreviewmaine@gmail.com. Signed copies will be available as supplies last.
Jim Nichols was born and raised in Freeport. He and his wife Anne and their Flat-coat retriever Jesse are now splitting time between Maine and Santa Fe. His work has been published in numerous venues, including Change Seven, december, Esquire, Zoetrope ASE, Narrative, Night Train, River City, elimae, The Clackamas Review, American Fiction Vol.9, Germ and Portland Monthly. His novel Closer All The Time won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Fiction, and his prior novel Hull Creek was runner-up for the same award in 2012. He has received several prizes for short fiction, including the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction and The Willamette Fiction Prize, and has multiple Pushcart nominations.
Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won the 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), an Oprah magazine summer-reading pick and winner of both the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Ernie’s Ark was excerpted on NPR's “Selected Shorts” and selected by several towns and cities as their “One Book, One Community” read.