Katherine Towler is author of the novels Snow Island, Evening Ferry, and Island Light, and co–editor with Ilya Kaminsky of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and graduate degrees in writing and literature at Johns Hopkins and Middlebury College. She has been awarded fellowships by Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and served as the Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy. She teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at Southern New Hampshire University and lives in Portsmouth with her husband.
Praise for The Penny Poet of Portsmouth
"Katie Towler's lovely memoir is beautifully written, keenly
observed, and conveys better than any book I've read the necessary
and even urgent solitude of the writing life."—Alan Lightman,
author of Einstein's Dreams
"This subdued memoir is suffused with a benign calm, like a breath
of tranquility from a world parallel to our own." —Madison Smartt
Bell
"A beautifully observed, honest ode to the literary life, the deep
connections between writers, the power of solitude, and the work of
creation; The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is a lovely poem to the
incalculable power of words." —Karen Bender, author of Refund,
finalist for the National Book Award
"The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is one of the most beautiful and
touching books I've read in a long time. It is more than just the
portrait of the author's unlikely friendship with Robert Dunn, a
fabulously talented, wise, eccentric, and mysterious local poet; it
is also the portrait of a small city in the midst of change, and of
the art of poetry as it vitally and movingly exists outside the
academy and the official avenues of recognition. And most of all,
it's a portrait of the solitude and fellowship all artists need and
seldom find. This book deserves a wide and enthusiastic audience."
—Alan Shapiro, author of Night of the Republic, a Finalist for the
National Book Award
"The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is a love song to the mysteries of
art and friendship. In language that is as sharp as a crystalline
winter morning in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the village that
serves as the backdrop of the memoir, Towler chronicles the
burgeoning of a friendship as it coincides with her own
appreciation of what it means to be a friend. This memoir is an
exploration of the human condition and the beautiful, maddening
desire to get it all down on the page." —Wiley Cash, New York Times
bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home
"More than just an elegy for an exuberant and elusive soul, this
graceful book is a meditation on success and dying, and finally, a
love letter to the immortal written word." —Mark Sundeen, author of
The Man Who Quit Money
"Katherine Towler's The Penny of Portsmouth is a book about a New
England town, and yes a book about the friendship of two writers in
that wildly populated landscape of solitude, but it is also, in the
end, a book that educates us on how to be human living in the
world's most awkward empire, how to love life, love it even in our
strangest of centuries, love it even when one has no stomach for
it, love it in our neighbors, our streets, our solitudes, our
antagonists who are (often) ourselves." – Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Dancing in Odessa
"Thanks so very much for the arc of The Penny Poet of Portsmouth.
It's rare these days but I stayed up half the night that very night
reading it, finishing it over breakfast the next day. I've already
sent in my Indie Next nomination and will make it a staff pick in
March when it releases." —Dale, Porter Square Books, Inc.
"A gorgeous meditation on friendship and place, writing and life,
and —of course—the Poet of Portsmouth. I loved every beautiful
word." —Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread
Praise for Snow Island
Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick
"Luminous and moving." —The Boston Globe
"An evocative tale... The carefully chosen, and ultimately spare,
language of Snow Island belies its quiet emotional wallop." —The
Denver Post
"An elegant novel... Katherine Towler creates an engrossing
atmosphere that feels true to its time and place."
—Sun–Sentinel
"Lovely... This is the perfect novel to curl up with on a winter's
night... and then share with a friend." —Ann LaFarge, syndicated
reviewer
"Captures the complicated emotions of falling in love for the first
time." —The Dallas Morning News
"Slow cooking shows in the plausibility of the story, the vividness
of the scenes, the depth of her characters, and the poetry of her
language... a really fine novel." —The Portsmouth Herald
"..graceful. . .Towler's strength is her deft rendering of time and
place. Lyrical and gentle, Alice's wartime coming–of–age and the
island itself continues to resonate after the last page."
—Publishers Weekly
"A small New England island in the early 1940s is the setting for
this lovely first novel. . .beautifully written —life on the remote
island is easy to visualize and the two stories are smoothly
linked." —Library Journal
"Towler's first novel adeptly personifies loneliness in the
self–imposed exile of George Tibbits and the circumstantial
solitude of Alice Daggett, both of whom are bonded by a common need
for the isolated shores of Snow Island." —Booklist
"[A] sensitive debut novel...a well–crafted tale, subtle and
memorable, that should have a broad appeal." —Kirkus Reviews
Evening Ferry
"Readers familiar with Snow Island, Katherine Towler's fine first
novel, will be further delighted by her return to those
hardscrabble New England waterfolk in Evening Ferry: a strong and
deeply satisfying tale of the islanders' lives, loves, and losses
from the Great Depression of the 1930s to America's war in Vietnam.
Readers new to Towler's fiction have a happy discovery awaiting
them." — John Barth, author of The Sot–Weed Factor and The Book of
Ten Nights and a Night
"[Towler] imagines characters and an island life that feel
remarkably real. Inner quandaries over love, sex, memories, dreams,
and codes of duty are rendered with a light but vivid elegance...
by intertwining each era's history and cultural shifts with the
stories of individual islanders, Towler is creating a memorable
regional trilogy." —The Providence Journal
"When one is held in place by the past, the only way to move life
forward is to find a way to break those chains. It is such a
journey that Katherine Towler places at the center of Evening
Ferry. Evening Ferry succeeds in part because the characters tell
an interesting story, but also because of the way the novel takes
the reader to a world far removed from present experience." —The
Denver Post
"Towler's two books, with their overlapping characters and
philosophies, interlock neatly, like pieces of a larger jigsaw
already fully imagined... a compelling achievement." —Boston
Globe
"Poignant... In a country deeply divided by the Vietnam conflict,
Evening Ferry is the calm before the storm." —Curledup.com
"As with the first installment, Towler succeeds in bringing the
small island community to vivid life, and the introspective
characters are sympathetic...it is gracefully written, and the
subtleties of family life should keep readers interested in the
continuing saga." —Publishers Weekly
"The unhurried pace, simple and recognizable characters, and
lyrical descriptions will draw readers into this Vietnam War–era
novel." —Booklist
"Evening Ferry grips readers, beginning to end, with a gradual
revealing of hard and sometimes redeeming truths about characters
we truly care about." —The Concord Monitor
"The arc of the main characters' lives provide puzzles and also the
pieces you need, in the end, to find closure. Evening Ferry has
strong characters and surprises. Its sense of place is seductive."
—Fosters Daily Democrat
"Evening Ferry offers readers a luminous and deeply moving journey
back to the fictional Snow Island, the title of Towler's first
book... a rich and satisfying foray into another world." —The Cape
Codder
"Towler brings a strong sense of place, exquisite pacing and deft
characterization to the quahoggers and others whose isolated lives
depend on the sea." —Mystic River Press
Island Light
"Towler's characters are as complex and contradictory as those with
whom we live our lives...[she] accomplishes the higher art of
bringing us to see the drama in the commonplace, the demands of the
ordinary, the conflicts and decisions made by people living the
lives we discover in our families, our neighbors, ourselves." —The
Boston Globe
"Towler succeeds in bringing the small island community to vivid
life, and the introspective characters are sympathetic...gracefully
written, and the subtleties of family life should keep readers
interested in the continuing saga." —Publishers Weekly
"Inner quandaries over love, sex, memories, dreams, and codes of
duty are rendered with a light but vivid elegance...by intertwining
each year's history and cultural shifts with the stories of
individual islanders, Towler is creating a memorable regional
trilogy." —Providence Journal
"A lyrical, passionate, nuanced tale of life on the tiny island...
Those familiar with the first two volumes will enjoy re–engaging
with the island people, and newcomers will find themselves beguiled
with Towler's characters and her thoughtful themes of war,
isolation and family." —Portsmouth Herald
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