This year’s Kenan Visiting Writer, Melissa Faliveno, has a new book, TOMBOYLAND, coming out August 4th from Topple Books.
“In this intrepid debut essay collection, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, TOMBOYLAND navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, TOMBOYLAND asks curious and critical questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.”
TOMBOYLAND has been praised as:
The most anticipated debuts of 2020 – Electric Literature
An expressive voice evolving deliberately, resisting having to be one thing or another – Kirkus Reviews
Tomboyland is everything I want an essay collection to be: beautiful, smart, difficult, honest, hopeful, and haunting, just like the experiences it depicts. – Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “winning debut collection.”
Read more about TOMBOYLAND here!
