Credit: Jennifer Bravo
Kelly’s Books to Go, Mechanics’ Hall, and MWPA, are pleased to host the launch of The Rabbit, a chapbook by Coco McCracken. The Rabbit was chosen by critically acclaimed nonfiction writer Melissa Febos as the winner of the 2021 Maine Chapbook Contest. Febos notes, “The Rabbit engulfed me in its pitch-perfect voice, which evokes the sorrow and elation of teenaged girlhood while implying the wise retrospective gaze of its narrator. From Snow White and Princess Diana to the peril and sublimity of the mosh pit, Coco McCracken lucidly articulates the ordinary and acute conflicts that attend coming of age, and the resiliency of her young protagonist."
Joining in the launch will be the 2019 and 2020 Maine Chapbook Series winners, poet Suzanne Langlois and fiction writer Brandon Dudley. Writer Jaed Coffin will also join Coco McCracken in conversation about The Rabbit.
Chapbooks will available for sale at the event, and Coco will sign copies afterwards, along with Suzanne and Brandon.
Please save your seat at this FREE event by clicking on the button above.
Born into a mixed-race family in Toronto, Coco McCracken has always been interested in writing about the intersectionality of place, race, and identity. With mystery shrouding her ancestry, her work is equal parts detective work and rhetorical relief, which comes from examining what it means to be a half-Asian, half-white woman, today. Now, raising a young daughter in Maine she embarks on her new immigrant identity as half-Canadian, half-American. Coco currently has a newsletter called Coco’s Echo, writes a monthly column for Amjambo Africa, and is working on her first memoir.
Jaed Coffin is the author of Roughhouse Friday and A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, his essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, Jezebel, The Sun, and many other publications. He’s been a featured speaker at TEDx and Moth Radio Hour, as well as a guest at over twenty colleges and universities. Jaed teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters.
Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook Bright Glint Gone was chosen by award-winning poet Martha Collins as the winner of the 2019 Maine Chapbook Series. Her poems have appeared in The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Off The Coast, Rattle, and on the Button Poetry channel. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Independent Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Portland and teaches high school English in Falmouth.
Brandon Dudley’s chapbook Hazards of Nature: Stories was selected by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez for the 2020 Maine Chapbook Series. Dudley is a graduate of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, where he was managing editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. His short fiction has won a Maine Literary Award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His stories, essays, interviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, and others. A former journalist, he now teaches high school English in Brunswick, where he lives with his wife and two sons.