About The Spirit In My Shoes
Title: THE SPIRIT IN MY SHOES
Author: John Michael Cummings
Category: Fiction
Pages: 204
Trim: 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-1-960329-10-3
Format: Trade Paperback
Publication Date: November 2023
Description:
Featuring twenty-three stories, John Michael Cummings’s debut story collection brims with the vitality and complexity of our shared humanity. In tales that conjure comparisons to John Updike, Raymond Carver, and William Gay, Cummings tells the truth about loneliness, relationships, and the common struggles we all face with prose both precise and vibrant. Cummings’s voice, assured yet questioning, will stay with you long after you’ve finished The Spirit In My Shoes.
Blurbs:
“In three decades of vibrant and luminous stories set against the backdrop of historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, novelist John Michael Cummings’s debut collection, The Spirit In My Shoes, trains his distinctive eye for moeurs domestique on the community he knows best—and does so with a fierce optimism that captures the abiding promise of the human spirit.” —Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House
“A John Michael Cummings story is like no other. He is an original in his characters, his dramatic situations, and his use of language.” —Walter Cummins, author of Telling Stories: Old & New
“With versatility that takes the reader from a headstone maker to an artist who plays with the meaning of black-and-white, Cummings defies us to read any story just once.” —Patty Friedmann, author of Too Jewish and Secondhand
For additional information, or to arrange an interview with Jeff Esterholm, contact:
Ross Tangedal, Ph.D.
Director & Publisher, Cornerstone Press
CCC 127 | 1801 Fourth Ave
Stevens Point, WI 54481
cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu
(715)346-4532
Published by Cornerstone Press. Distributed to the trade by Ingram Lightning Source, a division of Ingram.
Please send copies of any review or mention to cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu
Buy the book, and follow the author on social media:
Learn more about the writer. Visit the Author’s Website.
Like the Authors Facebook Fan Page.
Author Bio:
I’m the author of three novels, two novellas, and more than one hundred short stories. My debut novel, The Night I Freed John Brown (Penguin Group, 2008), won The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People and was selected for Black History Month by USA Today. Ugly To Start With (West Virginia University Press, 2011) was a finalist in the Foreword INDIES Book of Year Award. Don’t Forget Me, Bro (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016) was widely excerpted in the Chicago Tribune.
My nonfiction has been published by New York Daily News, The Providence Journal, and The Newark Star-Ledger. My short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, North American Review, and The Iowa Review. I was a finalist in the Miami University Novella Contest, a semi-finalist in the Winnow Press 2004 First Book Award for Fiction, was twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and received an Honorable Mention in The Best American Short Stories series.
I taught English at Seminole State College of Florida and wrote business news for the Fairfax Times and alternative news for the Utne Reader. I hold a BA in studio arts and graphic design from George Mason University and an MFA in creative writing from University of Central Florida.
My short story collection The Spirit in My Shoes is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press/University of Wisconsin (November 2023).