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See the cover for Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh

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See the cover for Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh

Blue Selvage, the debut poetry collection by Preeti Parikh, weaves lyric, essayistic, and documentary modes into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and the body as living archives marked by gendered, racialized, and colonial histories. Moving across shifting homelands, languages, and forms, the collection examines memory, inheritance, and reclamation, asking how the body carries what culture attempts to erase and how language can become a means of re-stitching fractured identities.

Blue Selvage will be published on November 1, 2026, by Tupelo Press and is available for preorder now.

Preeti Parikh is an Indian-born poet and essayist whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Cincinnati Review, The Margins, and Nonwhite and Woman. A Kundiman Fellow, National Poetry Series finalist, and recipient of awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, she holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Ohio with her family, and Blue Selvage is her debut poetry collection.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Blue Selvage, designed by Ann Aspell with art from Joanne Dugan, along with a Q&A with Parikh about its creation.

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Interviews

Tomás Q. Morín on Dystopia, Grief, and the Feline Voice Behind Cat Love

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Tomás Q. Morín on Dystopia, Grief, and the Feline Voice Behind Cat Love

Set in the near future, in an America that has resorted to flight travel assisted by the use of Emotional Support Humans, Tomás Q. Morín‘s Cat Love is a sometimes whimsical, sometimes tragic, always imaginatively conceived treatise on the nature of human relationships.  Narrated by an unnamed cat, we traverse her abrupt abduction from the cozy confines of feline comfort to the jarring realities of orchestrated car accidents, buck hunting in dry lake beds, and the multiple hazards of manufactured food.  Along the way, our cat heroine opines on art, music, and the afterlife in witty, often sardonic detail. With the artistry of a poet tripping the words fantastic in the realm of fiction, Morín navigates us through an emotionally hazardous tale juxtaposed with forgotten (forlorn?) tenderness to its ultimate, heartfelt conclusion.  I asked him about his motivation in constructing this world. 

The following is our exchange, conducted by email and edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews

6/6/(2)6: A Devilishly Fun (and Serious) Q&A with Phoning Faust Author Sophie Mutiara Nova

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6/6/(2)6: A Devilishly Fun (and Serious) Q&A with Phoning Faust Author Sophie Mutiara Nova

Queer horror has long used monsters, ghosts, and demons to explore questions of identity, belonging, and survival. In Phoning Faust, filmmaker and writer Sophie Mutiara Nova brings those themes into the digital age, following a lonely young woman whose late-night call to the Devil spirals into a story about desire, connection, trauma, and the search to be truly seen. Equal parts supernatural horror and emotional reckoning, the novel examines loneliness, online relationships, and the bargains we make with ourselves and others in pursuit of acceptance.

I caught up with Nova via email for a devilishly fun, thoughtful, and deeply personal conversation about queer horror, internet culture, chronic illness, writing through trauma, and finding connection in a world that can often feel isolating.

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Interviews, my reading life

Valley of the Moms by Hannah Selinger is a thriller very much rooted in place

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Valley of the Moms by Hannah Selinger is a thriller very much rooted in place

Hannah Selinger is the author of the memoir Cellar Rar: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly and a James Beard Award-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Eater, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, and elsewhere. Now, her debut novel has arrived on bookshelves, bringing her sharp eye for power, class, and human behavior into the world of fiction.

Valley of the Moms is a sharp, twisty thriller set in an affluent Massachusetts suburb where school politics can be as vicious as any crime. When Anna Plummer challenges an exclusionary PTO policy, she inadvertently sets off a chain of events that culminates a year later with her death and her husband’s determination to uncover what really happened. Told through alternating timelines and perspectives, the novel explores grief, privilege, social status, and the secrets that lurk beneath the polished surface of a seemingly idyllic community.

We asked Selinger to answer our recurring My Reading Life so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Fancy Meeting You author Louise Marburg wishes she had read Our Bodies, Ourselves as a teenager

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Fancy Meeting You author Louise Marburg wishes she had read Our Bodies, Ourselves as a teenager

Louise Marburg‘s debut novel, Fancy Meeting You, follows Laura Harrigan, a middle-aged woman whose life is built on a foundation of carefully crafted lies. Depending on the audience, Laura is a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or the mother of Yale-bound twins, but in reality she’s single, childless, underemployed, and spending many of her evenings at a Baltimore dive bar. Over the course of her fiftieth year, Laura navigates awkward family gatherings, questionable romances, and unexpected friendships, forcing her to reckon with who she is beneath the stories she tells. Funny, sharp, and unsentimental, the novel offers a fresh take on midlife reinvention through a heroine who is neither seeking marriage nor motherhood, but her own version of fulfillment.

Marburg is an acclaimed short story writer whose previous collection received reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. At age sixty-five, Fancy Meeting You marks her debut novel.

We asked Marburg to answer our recurring My Reading Life series so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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book list, Recommendations

Seven Novels About Trips Gone Wrong Recommended by Vincent Chu

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Seven Novels About Trips Gone Wrong Recommended by Vincent Chu

The fantasy of leaving home for a faraway place has always held my imagination. As a boy, I dreamed of running away from our comfortable home to find new joys in the woods behind the Safeway. As an adult, I’ve twice sold my furniture and moved overseas. In novels, we know that when a character leaves for a trip, things are bound to go sideways. Still, there are levels to it, and it’s those travel novels that don’t just surprise, but unravel into something wholly bizarre and subversive and painfully human, that I love and come back to.

In my debut novel, Nice Places, a thirty-something named Georgie decides to travel the world for one year to escape the “daily existential discomfort” of his conventional life. But before he can even make it to the airport, a meditation guru robs him and he finds himself at a guesthouse in the bad part of his city, just miles from home. With only his phone and an unexpected community of guests and locals, his trip quickly takes a turn.

Here are some of my favorite novels that also feature trips going wrong.

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Interviews, my reading life

F. Scott Fitzgerald is Debut Author Haili Blassingame’s Literary Daddy

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F. Scott Fitzgerald is Debut Author Haili Blassingame’s Literary Daddy

Haili Blassingame’s debut novel, They All Fall in Love at the End, follows Cat St. Clair, a twenty-four-year-old writer trying to balance an open relationship, artistic ambition, and the chaos of the 2024 election. What begins as a quest for freedom and self-determination spirals into a complicated love triangle involving her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend, forcing Cat to confront the consequences of pursuing everything she wants. Set against a backdrop of political tension and creative uncertainty, the novel explores nonmonogamy, desire, identity, and the challenge of imagining new possibilities for love and liberation.

Blassingame is a producer for NPR’s 1A and has written for publications including The New Republic and The New York Times, where her Modern Love essay “My Choice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness” went viral. She previously worked on NPR’s Code Switch and Weekend Edition and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from American University.

We asked Blassingame to answer our recurring My Reading Life so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

P.C. Verrone read through all of Toni Morrison while writing Rabbit, Fox, Tar

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P.C. Verrone read through all of Toni Morrison while writing Rabbit, Fox, Tar

P.C. Verrone’s debut novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar, is a fable-like story about a mysterious young Black woman whose arrival in a tightly knit neighborhood threatens to unravel its foundations. When Baby appears in Original Hill and begins a romance with the ambitious Lucius “Lucky” Foote, her presence upends a contentious city council race and intensifies long-simmering tensions over a Black neighborhood destroyed decades earlier to make way for a highway. As Baby becomes entangled in the lives of the community’s residents and begins questioning her origins, the novel explores race, power, belonging, memory, and the stories communities tell about themselves.

Verrone’s work has appeared in FIYAH, PodCastle, Nightmare, and numerous anthologies. He has been a Tin House Resident, a Playwrights’ Center Fellow, and a WNDB Black Creatives Revisions Workshop winner.

We asked Verrone to answer our recurring My Reading Life so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

Continue reading “P.C. Verrone read through all of Toni Morrison while writing Rabbit, Fox, Tar” →