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The Emerging Authors program is indefinitely suspended.

 

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University's MFA program in Creative Writing. She teaches General Education at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, CA. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. Her work has been featured in Electric Lit, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, Entropy, The Los Angeles Review, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage.

 

 

Imagine a clique of high school friends who are so indistinguishable from one another that they even have the same first names. Now imagine these teenage girls—all of them named Brittany—growing up in the early 2000s, in the era of boy bands, flip-flops, Britney Spears, and the technology explosion, when everything felt new, exciting, possible. So why must the Brittanys experience the age-old trials and tribulations that coming of age inevitably brings? Because, it seems, it takes a journey through the crucible of adolescent angst in order for any teen—even a Brittany—to emerge into adulthood. This phenomenon, logical yet surprising based on the privileged circumstances of the characters, is the premise of the compelling debut fiction novel The Brittanys.

"I’ve never read any book that captures so perfectly all the sweet and bitter and mess and tenderness and hard lessons in being fourteen. Nor the highly specific, totally unfakeable feeling of the year 2004. Brittany Ackerman must have kept the most detailed diary. Her voice in The Brittanys, naive yet seeing all, looking both forward and backward, always figuring and looking for wisdom. I found every page of this book to be the perfect mix of entertaining, satisfying, questioning, and moving. It glows with Ackerman’s love for her characters. I could have stayed inside it forever."—Sarah Gerard

“The precision and accuracy with which Ackerman captures this particular early-2000s period of American adolescence makes for a richly nostalgic portrait of lost time. The sometimes absurd but often recognizable details of this moment—the smell of Eggo waffles in the toaster, a Nokia flip phone as a status symbol, learning to play Nintendo 64 games to impress sophomore boys—contribute to the sense of humor and retrospective self-awareness, even while the novel always treats its narrator with a tender generosity.”—Alice Martin

Read the review/interview by Pam Anderson on The Prospectus Blog..

A young widow and breast cancer survivor, Stacey Lawrence is a veteran teacher of poetry and creative writing at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in The Comstock Review, Eunoia Review, and Flora Fiction, among others. In 2019 and 2021 she was short-listed for the FISH Poetry prize judged by Billy Collins. She is an avid hiker in the Catskill Mountains, where she has a writing cabin. Her first book, Fall Risk, has received advanced praise and is now available from Finishing Line Press and Amazon.

 

 

Stacey Lawrence’s brand new debut poetry collection from Finishing Line Press, Fall Risk, is a gutsy rendition of a relationship—and a life—torn apart by tragedy.

 

 

“It's so seldom a book of poems can contain both love poems and acceptance of grief. Take Stacey’s poems to a couch, curl under your great-grandmother's quilt, and understand love and loss are one.” —Nikki Giovanni

“Stacey Lawrence’s first collection of poems renders, in beautiful and precise language, a testament to the human capacity for endurance and survival. At times intimate, at times cinematic, these are moving pieces marked by the poet’s ability to capture us with fresh and brilliant detail, as in ‘Therapy,’ where we encounter ‘a large lone goldfish/orange like an/American president’ or in ‘Christmas in England,’ where ‘silverware glints like dinoflagellates/in a dark lagoon.’ A work of great intimacy and individuality.” —Catherine Doty

See our review of Fall Risk in Issue 5 of Prospectus, due out December 21, 2021.

Read Lynda Scott Araya’s interview with Stacey Lawrence on The Prospectus Blog.