Book Launch Party: "Notes to New Mothers"

Wed Nov 11th 5:30am - 6:30pm Cameron Art Museum 

Book Launch party: "Notes to New Mothers" Reception Hall 5:30pm - 6:30pm Free; registration required

REGISTRATION LINK FOR “Launch Party: Notes to New Mothers": https://52374.blackbaudhosting.com/52374/Launch-party-Notes-to-New-Mothers

UNCW Writers' Week presents Notes To New Mothers, a book that offers a new map of motherhood as a singular and communal experience. Enjoy a reading featuring editors Rebecca Knight & Julie Buntin, with contributors Emily Louise Smith and KaToya Ellis Fleming. Pomegranate Books will have copies of the book available for purchase at the event.

In the early days with their first babies, two friends began comparing notes on what, exactly, was going on in their postpartum bodies and minds. What was a wake window? How could anyone function under the weight of so much love? In search of the book they needed, editors Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin invited sixty-five acclaimed writers and artists—including Julia Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Liana Finck, Jenny Slate, and Naima Coster—to riff on shared concerns: burp volcanos, career shifts, breastfeeding logs, partnership dynamics, minor victories and major insecurities.

Notes to New Mothers is a bedside table companion for every mother who has wondered how she’ll make it through the wilderness of early parenthood, and a window into her experience for the family and friends desperate to better care for their beloved moms-to-be. Brave, unexpected, and revelatory, Notes to New Mothers offers a new map of motherhood as both a singular and communal experience.

** A book signing will follow the reading.

About the writers:

KaToya Ellis Fleming is a writer, the editor of Lookout Books, and an associate professor of publishing arts at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has been awarded various fellowships and residencies including a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and the American Copy Editors Society Richard S. Holden Fellowship. She was the recipient of the 2019-2020 Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship where she worked, in residence, alongside the Oxford American editorial staff, and began work on her bibliomemoir, Finding Frank, an excerpt from which was published in the Spring 2020 issue of the magazine. Her words have additionally appeared in the Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Chautauqua Journal, Notes to New Mothers (W. W. Norton) and elsewhere. A graduate of Spelman College and the University of Georgia MFA program, she now lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina. Emily Louise Smith directs The Publishing Laboratory and coordinates the department's post-baccalaureate and undergraduate publishing certificate tracks. She is the publisher of Lookout Books, which she cofounded in 2009, and Ecotone magazine.

Under her leadership, Lookout titles have won or been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among many others. Her honors include an Innovation in Teaching Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and an Arts Council of Wilmington Artist Grant, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge, and the Hub City Writers Project.

Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Boulevard, Gravy, the Southern Review, Notes to New Mothers (W. W. Norton), and Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed), among other publications.

Julie Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men, is out now from Random House. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Indie Next pick, a Nevada Statewide Read, a Michigan Notable Book, and featured by Belletrist and Book of the Month. The novel was released in ten territories worldwide and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Buntin’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times, among other publications. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New York Community Trust. In September, Norton will publish her collaborative nonfiction project, Notes to New Mothers, co-edited with Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest, and elsewhere. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Rebecca Knight is the author of the novels Hex (Viking, 2020) and The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury, 2015), the bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems Lofoten (Aschehoug, 2012), and the nonfiction collection Notes to New Mothers (W. W. Norton, 2026, co-edited with Julie Buntin). Knight served as Screenwriter and Executive Producer of The Sunlit Night film adaptation, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now a major motion picture starring Jenny Slate, Gillian Anderson, and Zach Galifianakis. Knight has reviewed restaurants for The Village Voice and novels for The New York Times Book Review, and her essays have appeared online in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among others. A graduate of Yale and the NYU MFA program, she lives and writes in New Hampshire.