Emily Choate | writer

Writing about Sara Moore Wagner’s new collection, Hillbilly Madonna, for Chapter 16 was such a pleasure. Wagner’s poems speak in moving, feminist ways about her Appalachian origins and family trauma. She highlights experiences that have often remained hidden in the discourse about Appalachia and opioid addiction. As she puts it, “This book gives a face and a voice to the addict mother, one who is struggling to find a way out.” My review is up today at Chapter 16.

I’m thrilled to share that a short CNF piece of mine has been chosen as a Notable Finalist for Longridge Review’s Barnhill Prize. I like this journal’s mission—essays that evoke and respect the mysteries of childhood. Thanks to Longridge and judge Sonya Livingston! You can read my gal, “Field Day, 1990,” in their lovely new issue.

I fell in love with Ada Calhoun’s memoir, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. Not only does it provide the lit history dishing you may crave, but it also illuminates the super hella entangled ways in which so many of us in the arts tend to live, whether we’re based in the East Village or in the smallest of podunks. My review’s up today at Chapter 16.

I loved Casey Parks’ Diary of a Misfit: a Memoir and a Mystery. Not only is this book moving and insightful—it’s also impossible to put down. Parks’ debut memoir will appeal to a broad range of readers who enjoy complex stories about growing up in small places, so I plan to push it on all kinds of folks. My review’s up today at Chapter 16.

For my beloved Peauxdunque Review, I write a recurring a music feature. I’m happy now to share this piece, newly online, which let me take a deep dive into Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s largely forgotten 1978 album, Pronto Monto. My love letter to the McGarrigles: their roguish spirit, their wry self-knowledge, and their clear-eyed grownup love songs. You can read this piece on the Peauxdunque Review site.

I was so excited to write about Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White’s new memoir-in-essays, A Year Without Months. Given its powerful and honest insights into subjects that are vitally relevant to so many of us, I hope that this work finds many readers. You can read my review at Chapter 16.

I’m so pleased to share my latest review for Chapter 16. Poet Ocean Vuong seems to specialize in evoking multi-sensory dreamscapes of memory, and his new collection, Time Is A Mother, delivers them nonstop. You can read my review here. (Update: This piece also appears in this week’s Nashville Scene)

I’m pleased to share my latest piece for Chapter 16, reviewing Shift Work, a nuanced and skillful new collection from West Tennessee poet Bobby C. Rogers. Out from LSU Press. Until now, I’d never read poems that more perfectly capture the world of my dad’s Duck River TN origins. Rogers’ work addresses that experience of Southern past but avoids cliché and sentimentality.

I’m so pleased that I had the chance to review Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue—an adventurous new anthology of speculative fiction about our world’s bodies of water and our myriad relationships to them. It’s a fascinating book, wonderfully edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Troy L. Wiggins, and Pan Morigan, and it’s out today from Third Man Books. You can read my review at the always thirst-quenching Chapter 16.

I’m thrilled to share that a piece of my short fiction, “Field School,” appears in the new issue of storySouth! I’ve read this journal for a long time, so seeing my gal in their “pages” is a special pleasure. For years, I’ve been over-identifying with contract work archeologists, and this story is my love letter to them.