chapbooks Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide (2017), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (2014). Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays for the last several years, and her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Montgomery holds an MFA in creative writing from California State University-Fresno and a PhD in English in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.
At Electric Lit Montgomery tagged seven "books about searching for place, self, and belonging," including:
Engine Running by Cade MasonRead about the other entries on the list.
Cade Mason’s debut essay collection is an innovative archive of stories and selves frozen in time, an exploration of whether home only exists after it is gone.Examining what it means to grow distanced from the people and place that raised you, Mason shares the story of his gradual separation from his religious West Texas home and fractured family. Mason travels through endless roads and dusty farms, weaving childhood stories with family secrets in order to piece together the story of how his family fell apart—his father struggling to forget the past in the aftermath of divorce, his mother eager to move on to her future, his sister caught up in the chaos. This is a story of queerness in the rural South, of the myths of manhood, and of the end of a marriage, a family, and a home. Mason teaches readers what it means to love a place that you must also leave in order to live.
--Marshal Zeringue
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