Clarksville, TN – In her new essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise, Erin Langner’s prose delivers “narratives poised at the edge of loss or grief, the sensations that none of us seem able to escape.”
The prose proved so powerful that it moved creative nonfiction writer Wendy S. Walters to name Langner the 2021 winner of Zone 3 Press’ Creative Nonfiction Book Award.
“With beautiful, clear-eyed prose, she manages to invite us into the most intimate spaces of personal transformation and witness reckonings with need,” Walters wrote in her judge’s statement, also quoted above. “I admire how she portrays becoming as a consequence of relationship, whether a connection lasts a lifetime or just a few days.”
“Contest readings are always a choice event for me since they bring together a well-established writer with the emerging writer whose work they selected,” said Dr. Amy Wright, senior editor for Zone 3 journal and nonfiction editor for Zone 3 Press. “I love learning why particular manuscripts stand out for our judges.”
But the reading also gives area residents a chance to hear Walters read.
“I’m especially thrilled this year to hear Wendy S. Walters read because I have been a big fan of her innovative collection Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, which was named ‘best book of the year’ in 2015,’” said Wright, who also is a professor in the APSU of Languages & Literature and creative writing coordinator for the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University.
‘Illustrating the weight of emotion’
Langner’s Souvenirs from Paradise “gives us Las Vegas in all its glittering lights” while examining “what makes the city so special and how it contributed to the artist, curator, sister and mother she is today,” Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, wrote in her praise of the book.
To Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself …, the book is a “deeply moving meditation on family and loss, and the obsessions we turn to in order to distract ourselves from grief.
“Ironically, through the funhouse mirror of Las Vegas, a city filled with artifice, Langner is able to show us her true reflection, and make sense of herself as a mother and bereaved daughter,” Botton continued. “The result is a resonant, relatable and entertaining travelogue of the soul.”
But Walters’ words in her Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award judgment of the book might resonate the most.
“A lyrical intensity runs through the collection, illustrating the weight of emotion,” she wrote. “Langner’s facility in writing about grief is also stunning, as there’s no intent to hide it or sweep it away. One lives with it everywhere, all the time, as that, too, is life.”
You can order Souvenirs from Paradise at Austin Peay State University’s Zone 3 Press Marketplace webpage.
Zone 3 Press
Zone 3 Press is a nonprofit literary press dedicated to publishing and promoting the work of emerging writers.
The press sponsors the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry and the Zone 3 Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Winners receive $1,000 and book publication, as well as an invitation to give a reading at APSU with the contest judge.
Langner is an essayist and arts writer whose work has appeared in The Offing, Fourth Genre, Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and The Stranger.
Walters’ Multiply/Divide was named book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, Huffington Post and others.
