The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Each of her most recent three books won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize; Famous Last Words won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Two new books arrive in 2026: a memoir, Foxes for Everybody, from Northwestern University Press, and a poetry collection, Dear Beast, from Saturnalia.
At Lit Hub Pierce tagged "five books that I would have gratefully devoured as a new mother (and did gratefully devour as a not-quite-as-new one)." One title on the list:
Good Talk by Mira JacobRead about the other entries on the list.
Good Talk deftly navigates the complexities of race, family dynamics, politics, micro- and macroaggressions in the wake of the 2016 election, and the surprises that come along with a child’s inevitable questions. In addition to being thought-provoking andmoving and cathartic, Good Talk is genuinely funny and utterly engrossing. There’s a reason why graphic novels have become such a successful “gateway” medium for parents trying to get their kids into reading—and it’s not because a graphic novel is watered-down version of a traditional novel. The conciseness, the visual satisfaction, and the crucial interplay between image and word makes reading a good graphic novel—or, in this case, graphic memoir—an electrifying, transporting experience. That was the experience I had when I read Jacob’s Good Talk when my own children were five and eight. This was one of the first books I was able to lose myself in even while my kids were running around the house being the opposite of quiet, and it’s one I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
Good Talk is among Amy Butcher's eight defiant books by women.
--Marshal Zeringue
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