Interviews

Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

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Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers is an unflinchingly honest, wholly unique portrait of a sister left behind, charting the messy unraveling of a loved one’s addiction and the complicated search for acceptance in the aftermath. In the summer of 2015, Bowers’s beloved older sister, Sasha—an Ivy League-educated social worker—was found dead in her car from a fentanyl overdose. Stricken with grief and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Bowers armed herself with Sasha’s cell phone and began to investigate her sister’s secret life to answer the nagging questions she couldn’t shake: Who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? How did they know each other? Did the dealer really know Sasha in the way she deserved to be known?

Part epistolary, part mystery, part family history, part love letter, part diary, and part personal reinvention, Dear Dealer is an unputdownable homage to her sister and a reckoning with the steep cost of addiction and the way tremendous loss remodels one’s sense of self. 

I spoke with Bowers about her evolution from private writer to published author, avenging her sister’s death the best way she knew how, and what she’s learned from the processes of writing, publishing, and living the ending in real-time. 

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

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See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s The Ninth Island is a poetry collection about displacement, inheritance, and the search for home, following his family from Hawaiʻi to Las Vegas while reaching across generations to his Chinese American great-grandmother.

Yim is a poet and teacher whose work explores family, place, and the forces that shape Hawaiʻi and its diaspora. The Ninth Island will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on February 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Ninth Island, designed by Alex Wolfe with photography by Patrick Nevada. Below, Yim discusses images of Hawaiʻi, Las Vegas’s culture of facsimile, and how an empty pair of car seats came to capture the book’s themes of absence, longing, and displacement.

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Interviews

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

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If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different. 

Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow. 

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News

Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

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Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2026 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers the chance to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity of their first or second major book publication.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Forever Egg by Tierney Oberhammer

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See the cover for Forever Egg by Tierney Oberhammer

Tierney Oberhammer’s debut story collection, Forever Egg, explores love, identity, and the ways our choices reverberate across time. Spanning centuries, its twelve linked stories follow imperfect characters navigating family, desire, loss, and transformation.

Oberhammer is a Hudson Valley-based writer whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Forever Egg will be published by Modern Artist Press on March 2, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Forever Egg, designed by Kimberly Glyder. Below, Oberhammer discusses the search for a tactile design and how eggs and an erupting volcano came to capture the collection’s messy process of becoming.

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catching up with, Interviews

Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

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Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

What happens after your debut book is published? Would you do anything different for your second novel?

These are the questions I so often want to ask debut authors but never get the chance to unless I bump into them at an event or we cross paths in DMs on social media.

So, Debutiful’s launching a new Q&A to catch up with some of our favorite debuts as they launch and promote their next books.

First up is Ariel Delgado Dixon, whose first book, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was a Debut Debut Book of 2022. Her sophomore book, Sourland, came out in June 2026, and I caught up with her via email for this new series.

Sourland is about two women battling for control of a Northern California farm after its enigmatic owner suddenly disappears, forcing them to confront old rivalries, buried secrets, and the lingering influence of the woman who brought them together.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Last Stampede by EC Dorgan

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See the cover for The Last Stampede by EC Dorgan

EC Dorgan’s The Last Stampede is a surreal, genre-bending literary horror novel about grief, kinship, and reckoning in a dystopian near future. Four Métis strangers find their lives colliding in the aspen country surrounding a prairie city: a dying man haunted by tragedy, a revenge-driven horse woman whose broncos manifest from her arms, a corporate executive desperate to protect his company, and a young woman searching for her place in the world while facing a mysterious illness. When a global tech company begins destroying the natural landscape to replace it with data centres, the connections between the four emerge as they fight for revenge, redemption, and survival.

Dorgan writes weird fiction and horror on Treaty 6 Territory in the Edmonton area. Her work has appeared in The Dark, Augur Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and numerous anthologies. Named a Writers’ Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2024, she received the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story in 2025. She is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta.

The Last Stampede will be published by House of Anansi on April 27, 2027. It is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Last Stampede, designed by Alysia Shewchuk and forthcoming from House of Anansi. Below, Dorgan discusses the vivid image of a horse woman and her broncos that followed her throughout the writing process, the family photographs that helped inspire the design, and how the finished cover blends Western imagery, the Canadian prairie landscape, and the novel’s surreal, dystopian world.

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Interviews, my reading life

Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

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Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

Anna Heyward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vogue, and more, and studied animal behavior and welfare science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

In Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, Heyward writes about adopting Freddie, an Italian greyhound with severe separation anxiety, and how trying to understand his mind transformed the way she saw her own. It’s a moving meditation on the relationship between humans and animals, what we can truly know about another being, and how much we should try to change those we love.

Heyward answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

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Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.

In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.

ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

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Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

In False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi explores what happens when grief, ambition, and storytelling can’t be separated. The novel follows actor Jal Persad, who, after his mother’s death, begins writing a memoir that places her at the center of Jim Jones’s rise in Guyana. The problem: almost none of it is true. As Jal’s fabricated story gains attention, Farhadi examines the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, and what can be lost when those stories become more useful than the truth.

We asked Farhadi to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could learn about the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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