"There is a saying in Baltimore," said the sage himself, H.L. Mencken, "that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good." The same can be said of the different short pieces of prose collected in City Sages: Baltimore. Here are thirty-six ways to create literary art in Baltimore, and all of them are good. Edited by Jen Michalski, this first-ever anthology of some of Baltimore's best writers includes both famous and not-yet-famous scribes, both dead and alive. Michalski's objective was to represent an array of writers over a period of time who were born in Baltimore or lived in the city. The anthology includes pieces by seminal writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neal Hurston, Frederick Douglass, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; contemporary writers such as Laura Lippman, Anne Tyler, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Kimball, Alice McDermott, Jessica Anya Blau, and Rafael Alvarez; and emerging writers such as Rosalia Scalia, Caryn Coyle, Joe Young, and Adam Robinson.

City Sages: Baltimore

Literature & Fiction

United States

CityLit Press

The taste of a penny. Running for the bus. Carpets rolled and stacked like logs into a child's mountain. Laura Shovan mines gems from the everyday caverns of life. From these moments Shovan collected Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone, inaugural winner of the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize. The prize is named in honor of Clarinda Harriss, eminent Baltimore poet, publisher, and professor of English at Towson University. Harriss, educated at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, is a widely published, award-winning poet. She also serves as editor and director of BrickHouse Books, Maryland's oldest literary press. In rounds of blind judging, Shovan's entry topped submissions by finalists from Oregon and Washington state. Nearly forty writers entered CityLit Press's first chapbook contest, which was judged by art critic and poet Michael Salcman.

Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone

Shovan, Laura

Poetry

An Easy Place / To Die is a poetic journey through New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The first section wakes with city, culture, and mythmaking as introductions into poetry and a life. The second section wanders through the social world, specifically the defenses and offenses of lovemaking. The third section is intensely personal and examines uncontrollable events. For the penultimate section, the lyric returns as an elixir to extinction and the book climatically concludes with a long, projective finale that emphasizes presence. These poems spring out of the "nagbu," or well of poetic history, specifically the tragedy of Gilgamesh, answer Eliot's The Wasteland, and allude to both as "beginning" and "ending" epic poems in the book's Joycean scaffolding. "Cellucci makes {words} carry several kinds of speech in the most concise and musical manner," comments Andrei Codrescu.

An Easy Place / To Die

Cellucci, Vincent A.

Born into an Italian-Catholic family in a tight-knit Baltimore neighborhood, Leonora Dixon recalls the happy days of an innocent childhood. But how would she find the courage to leave a horrible marriage, provide for her daughters, and take charge of her future? "Peachy" Dixon's story is typical of girls born into immigrant families at the onset of World War II. They grew up in the 1950s and '60s immersed in stereotypical roles for women. So when the "man of the family" turns out to be an abusive drug addict, where is a woman and mother to turn? Her story is unique for the time in that she made bold decisions, but the right ones for the safety of her family. After a series of waitressing jobs at some of Baltimore's most famous restaurants, where she surrounded herself with friends, Leonora now looks back at what has been a "peachy" life.

A Peachy Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Dixon, Leonora

Historical

A man attempts to make a fresh start by reclaiming domain over his yard with the last birthday gift from his ex-wife, a lawnmower. A couple discovers Faulkner, shrimp and grits, Morgan Freeman, and how much they don't know about each other. A son reconnects with a distant father and his dog while "bucket-sitting" on a frozen lake. Weaving through these stories and more, a wandering musician-tackle box full of harmonicas in tow-is audience to his transient neighbors residing at a La Quinta Inn and Suites. At times funny, often close to the bone, always poignant, Ripple Meets the Deep defines the voice of a true storyteller whose tales of flawed people are at once local and expansive. Jason Tinney is a fiction writer, poet, and freelance journalist. He co-founded and performs with Donegal X-Press and The Wayfarers. He lives in Maryland.

Ripple Meets the Deep

Tinney, Jason

Literary

Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Fountain of Highlandtown, this new collection of fiction from a master storyteller continues to mine the lives of Americans we rarely hear about. In Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown, Rafael Alvarez returns to his main theme of exile, the heartbreak of leaving and being left behind set to the sound track of the Beatles, Dylan, and Zappa. From the East Baltimore immigrants stirring the old country back to life in deep-bellied pots and cast iron skillets to the lovers stroking the relics of lost romance, Alvarez's characters yearn for the lost and struggle mightily to make memory as tangible as flesh. 
From National Book Award winner James McBride: "Rafael Alvarez's talents--poetic deftness, tight dialogue, burning descriptive passages laid out with seeming ease--show why he was one of the gifted writers that turned The Wire into the greatest show in television history. These are stories from the treasure chest of one of America's most talented scribes, and I am glad he shared them with us."
Published in 1997, The Fountain of Highlandtown heralded the fiction debut of a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun who wanted to tell stories that would carry no expiration date. A late-night rewrite man, Alvarez used the rest of his time documenting the folklore of his hometown's neighborhoods. The practice imbued his short stories with a blue-collar honesty and kitchen-apron reality. Here is love in all of its pain and joy: love that Alvarez has for his city, that his characters have for one other, and that readers will have for these stories.
For the back cover of that first book, Stuart Dybek--author of Paper Lantern: Love Stories and The Coast of Chicago--said, "Rafael Alvarez's voice has already matured into a savvy, fleet prose style, and a pan-ethnic vision in which his allegiance, rather than to political correctness, is to integrity and vitality." It was twenty years ago today and the band is playing better than ever.
A lifelong Baltimorean, Alvarez began publishing poetry during the Ford Administration by rewriting the lyrics to Robin Trower songs. His early pieces appeared in the News-American--a defunct afternoon paper for the city's working class--and Chicory, a literary magazine published in Baltimore from 1966-to-1983. For twenty years, he worked as a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun, specializing in the folklore of city neighborhoods. He quit the paper in 2001 to work as a laborer on cable ships and soon after began writing for HBO's police drama, The Wire.
Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown is Alvarez's fourth collection of fiction.

Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown

Alvarez, Rafael

Winner of the Harriss Poetry Prize, judged by series editor Kwame Alexander and 2019 final judge Erica Dawson, Behind Normalcy is the first chapbook by Maryland-based poet Burgi Zenhaeusern. According to Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of Haint and Poetry Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, "Behind Normalcy is an opportunity to explore the tense and probing questions we hide behind and hide from in polite society. From the juxtaposition of sending a child off to school as a photographer's death makes front-page news, to the great aunt the poet knows best by her handmade socks, Zenhaeusern has the patience and the eye to peel back the layers of everyday and reveal the small truths lying beneath. In succinct, pure lines, she documents the quiet beauty of this fragmented and complex world." Poems in Behind Normalcy have appeared previously in Passager, Forage Poetry, American Poetry Journal, Oversound, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. CityLit Press is the publishing imprint of nonprofit literary arts organization CityLit Project (www.citylitproject.org).

Behind Normalcy

Zenhaeusern, Burgi

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