Derrick Harriell, author of Cotton
Derrick Harriell was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University and is currently a dissertator in UW-Milwaukee's English PhD program where he also teaches Creative Writing. He's worked as assistant poetry editor for Third World Press and is currently poetry editor for The Cream City Review. A 2009 Pushcart Nominee, Harriell's poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including The Cream City Review, Reverie, The Lamplighter Review, and is forthcoming in Main Street Rag. Cotton (Aquarius Press-Willow Books) is his first collection of poems.
"In his remarkable debut collection, Cotton, Derrick Harriell has created a mural in poems. The characters that inhabit this vivid tableau step into an active third dimension and allow us to witness the vicissitudes of their daily struggles, triumphs large and small, private desires. The community here is anchored by a specific mid-Western, African-American family which, in spite of both external and internal challenges, maintains its unity, however precarious at times. Death, passion, humor, mother wit, history, place, these are the colors that Harriell mixes and applies with such artistry that readers may not be so sure if they are watching a particular world or if that world is watching them. Harriell is among America's most exciting new voices in poetry."
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North Shore Doctors' Series with Jeanine Swenson, MD, LMFT
Our series of discussions with doctors from the North Shore Center is back! This fall, the educational series on the joys and challenges of parenting is titled: Staying Ahead of the Curve: Ideas for Parenting Effectively in the Age of Facebook, Text Messaging, and Exploding Technology. Dr. Jeanine Swenson starts the solution-focused series with a talk about "The Talk" titled, " Starting the Conversation: Taking the Sting Out of The Birds and Bees." Bring your questions and go home empowered.
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John Reimringer, author of Vestments
Here’s what Boswell bookseller Carl Hoffman had to say about Vestments: “Father Jim Dressler is a young Catholic priest having a very difficult time keeping his vow of celibacy. Aside from 
being tempted by his high school girlfriend, Father Jim meets a beautiful barmaid at a tavern in his parish and develops a relationship with her.
being tempted by his high school girlfriend, Father Jim meets a beautiful barmaid at a tavern in his parish and develops a relationship with her. Reimringer does not fall back on easy, cliched descriptions of Dressler's struggles with women, and gets to the heart of how Father Jim occupies himself (prayer, poker games, drinking bouts with other priests, sports, work on the parish building) to try to stay on the straight and narrow. He also doesn’t let the story dwell on the details of the struggle for too long, injecting hilarious scenes of Dressler with his working-class family, which is portrayed with striking clarity. The story of Father Jim's growth from a young boy to a newly ordained priest is also cleverly told in flashback scenes that are interwoven with the contemporary. The city of St. Paul and surrounding areas are shown in loving detail. All-in-all, this is truly a masterful and flawless first novel.”
Author bio: A former newspaper editor and a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, John Reimringer lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg.
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