From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep. Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered. That world no longer exists. In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community-and seemingly life as we know it-becomes more and more uncertain. Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.

Heather Seller's unpretentious, vernacular prose allows Georgia a persuasive mix of innocence and experience. These are miraculous stories of survival, perhaps even forgiveness. To some of us Georgia's life would be unthinkable. Sellers makes us believe it is well worth living.

"Heather Sellers writes delicious, dangerous prose. She starts you twenty-three floors up in condo squalor, nips across for dysfunction in Disney country, threatens incest in Hotlanta, and comes to grief on the Gulf. The dead-credible life of Georgia Jackson--ineffably sweet, thoroughly in love with her own luscious body, half in love with her lush of a father--skids at the edge of the surreal. Her story had me laughing through the lump in my throat. An original. A knockout debut."-Janet Burroway

Marketing Plans
Author tour in Sellers' hometowns in Michigan and Florida
Brochure and postcard mailings
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines

Heather Sellers was born and raised in Orlando, Florida and received a Ph.D. in Writing from Florida State University. Her work has appeared in "Indiana Review, New Virginia Review, The Hawaii Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Women's Review of Books," and "Sonora Review." Her story "Fla. Boys" is anthologized in "New Stories from the South, 1999: The Year's Best." She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999. She currently lives in Holland, Michigan, where she's an associate professor of English at Hope College.Excerpt From "Georgia Under Water"

From the short story, "Spurt"

I spent those days watching myself in every reflective surface known to Daytona Beach.

My knees weren't knobs anymore. My knees were lush transitions. My thighs shone golden-brown; my shins, paler, but long and strong. My ankles were slim, bony in a fetching way, my feet suddenly inches too long for my slaps and sandals. My hair swung in a shiny curtain behind me; my legs were in constant motion, counterpoint.

"You've had a growth spurt," my mother said. "Your shorts are way too short. When did this happen?"

"I think yesterday and/or the day before," I said. We were in

Winner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for PoetryIn The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of loss: the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse. She attempts to patch together some kind of new Eden in these aftermaths and to make a home and family from the remnants - memories from girlhood, a stray aunt and a niece, and what's left of her small, once lush garden after the punishing storms of summer. The Present State of the Garden is a clear-eyed, open-hearted poetic memoir.

Poetry. "Many of these sensitive, clever poems are about navigating the new waters of a non traditional family. The result is a cohesive, engaging collection in which a real heroine persona explores the often challenging terrain of the omicile"--Billy Collins. "When you open THE BOYS I BORROW, you won't find poems about angels or mythological heroines--what you'll find is life the way we live it, but more clearly seen and deeply understood than the average human can easily bear. The dramas in this book are the dramas of the life lived in the 21st century--we have trips to the fertility doctor, motorcycle rides to the Shangri-la Motel beneath a 'well hung, low slung' moon, stepsons whose 'tongues are simple antennae' and who play Nintendo, need help with their homework--in short, all of our wonderfully banal and beautiful world rendered in painterly precision and tender humor. This is a book that sustains"--Beth Ann Fennelly.

A "poignant" ("Boston Globe") family memoir that gives new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness
Heather Sellers is face-blind--that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that describes the inability to recognize faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. The truth was revealed two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and discovered the astonishing truth about her family, herself, and living with mental illness. In this uplifting memoir, Sellers illuminates a deeper truth: that even in the most chaotic and heartbreaking of families, love may be seen and felt.