Dear Friends, Family, & Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that my collection of short fiction, Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, will officially release on September 15th. The launch is on September 14th at the Rocky Neck Cultural Center at 7pm, where I will be reading with fellow Black Lawrence Press author Sara Johnson Allen. I will also be reading at the Sawyer Free Library, the temporary location on 21 Main St, Gloucester, on October12th at 5:30 pm. These events are free and open to the public.The Bookstore will be selling copies at both. You may also order a copy directly from Black Lawrence Press or any of the usual venues.

Warmly,

JoeAnn

JoeAnn Hart’s extraordinary stories take you on a trip: to a dystopian future; to the tidewaters of Gloucester; to the chambers of a haunted mill.  But in the end, the real place she takes us is the center of the human heart. These unforgettable tales are generous, brilliant, and fierce.

—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There, and co-author (with Jodi Picoult) of Mad Honey

In her fiction collection, Highwire Act and Other Tales of Survival, JoeAnn Hart’s characters go to the sea, deadhead flowers, eat artisanal pizzas, with humor and with humanity. These luminous stories shine long after you’ve read them.

—Ann Hood, author of Fly Girl

The fabulous cover was designed with a collage by Gloucester artist Hans Pundt.

In this collection, a young couple raise crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant’s grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories in Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals of our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with Covid, ecological destruction, grief, or mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do