After moving to a humble cottage outside of a tiny Texas town, Debra Monroe rids herself of an abusive husband, battles sexist contractors and workers as she renovates her home, and finally, after several disheartening letdowns, is able to adopt her beautiful baby daughter, Marie. Though elated that her dream is coming true, Monroe faces trials that befall her not just as a single mother but as a white mother of a black child. In On the Outskirts of Normal, two-time National Book Award nominee Monroe's heart creaks "like china with hairline cracks" each time a racist comment rolls their way or stares linger a little too long in their direction. Though she and her daughter face serious undiagnosed illnesses leading to innumerable, painful doctor visits, Monroe remains steadfast in her dedication toMarie and their small but tight family. Reading On the Outskirts of Normal at times feels like driving through an unwieldy thunderstorm at night on the unlit country roads that snake their way to Monroe's house in the woods; readers will feel her exhaustion but will be buoyed by her ever-present faith and fiery love. Pulitzer Prize winner Madeleine Blais writes that On the Outskirts of Normal is the "real deal: both a literary triumph and a triumph of the heart.

Growing up can mean growing pains and the joys of new independence. With maturity comes the shift from infinite possibilities to imminent realities. These thirteen stories describe the slow and subtle experience of growing up, allowing us to reflect upon the forces that pushed us toward adulthood and away from the familiar ground of youth that must be left behind if we are to learn how to soar on our own.

Raised in the Delta of Mississippi, Jan Cowan is repeatedly molested by her mother's lesbian lover, Judy Christine Hays, a small-town cop. Immediately after finishing high school, Jan flees Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. Patterned after her molester, Jan embarks on a career with the Memphis Police Department where she becomes a noted homicide detective. At the age of thirty-three, an unexpected occurrence triggers Jan's suppressed memories of having been molested. Unable to cope, Jan's childhood alter personality, Chris Hays, again manifests itself. In doing so, Chris sets out on a path of lustful revenge by luring lesbians from a gay club and later murdering them. She then displays their nude bodies in a public park on Beale Street, a thriving downtown tourist attraction. As the story unfolds, a private investigator, hired by one of the victim's father to find the killer, is falsely arrested after being caught near the crime scene where the fifth and final victim is found. One week following the arrest, Jan is greeted at the office by a pair of local fishermen who discovered her badge inside of a trash bag while fishing. Unbeknownst to the fishermen, the bag also contained solid evidence of the murders.

Raised in the Delta of Mississippi, Jan Cowan is repeatedly molested by her mother's lesbian lover, Judy Christine Hays, a small-town cop. Immediately after finishing high school, Jan flees Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. Patterned after her molester, Jan embarks on a career with the Memphis Police Department where she becomes a noted homicide detective. At the age of thirty-three, an unexpected occurrence triggers Jan's suppressed memories of having been molested. Unable to cope, Jan's childhood alter personality, Chris Hays, again manifests itself. In doing so, Chris sets out on a path of lustful revenge by luring lesbians from a gay club and later murdering them. She then displays their nude bodies in a public park on Beale Street, a thriving downtown tourist attraction. As the story unfolds, a private investigator, hired by one of the victim's father to find the killer, is falsely arrested after being caught near the crime scene where the fifth and final victim is found. One week following the arrest, Jan is greeted at the office by a pair of local fishermen who discovered her badge inside of a trash bag while fishing. Unbeknownst to the fishermen, the bag also contained solid evidence of the murders.

"A smart, funny, wry, and winning book."--Pam Houston, author of "Contents May Have Shifted"

Delia Arco spends her workdays counseling teenagers as outcast as she was and her nights caring for the baby daughter she loves fiercely. Searching furiously for the mother in herself, she struggles to understand her own mother's seedy life and puzzling disappearance. Then one night her world cracks open.

Debra Monroe is the author of four books of fiction and the memoir "On the Outskirts of Normal," which was released to national acclaim in 2010. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

Winner of The Flannery O'Connor Award, this critically acclaimed debut collection features ten stories set in the plains of the Midwest and the honky-tonks of the South. Witty and sly, exciting and powerful, these are stories about people who understand their own complicity belatedly, but never too late. Illuminated in these affecting, self-revealing stories is the measure of hope and healing that lies in every heart and coupling, no matter the trespass.

Debra Monroe has always written about the source of trouble, "that one incident you zero down to and everything bad that happens afterward happens because of it." The illusion that every problem has a clear-cut cause and discernible solution is apparently her gateway drug. It Takes a Worried Woman explores the outer limits of her faith that all past hardship could have been prevented and all future hardship might still be. Yet one person's trouble is often a small eddy in the outflow of history, and this book becomes a meditation on the price of effort exerted against fixed circumstances. Dense with history, lyrical, at times darkly funny, these essays explore sexism, racism, hate speech, violence, Monroe's grief about dwindling access to the natural world, and her fears as her daughter's adult life unfolds. Whether depicting the ubiquitous pressure to marry, the search for a shape-shifting familiar old enough to be her mother, or childcare as a game of risk, Monroe takes a measured look at problems that could be solved, problems that may never be, and at all the ways that trouble is big but hope, new strategies, fresh patience, and endurance are eventually big enough.

Existing creative nonfiction anthologies don't reflect the current cultural landscape. This anthology, featuring essays in forms both traditional and innovative, showcases the genre today – not how it was fifteen years ago when creative nonfiction seemed to include only memoir. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology reveals how quickly the genre evolved into exciting subgenres. With essays by established and emerging writers, it mirrors the rich panoply of the current American experience. Edited by creative writing professor and acclaimed author Debra Monroe, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology: Is demographically inclusive! It features writers from diverse racial, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Is aesthetically varied! It includes the traditional essay but also the lyric essay, the experimental essay, the essay as cultural analysis, and the researched essay. Teaches history, theory, and craft! The introductory chapter is widely researched yet concise, comprising history, theory, and craft principles – a careful synthesis of many teaching resources in a single chapter. Is interactive! Each selection includes introductory headnotes providing biographical information about the writer and pointing at one or two unique formal or thematic features, followed by writing prompts designed to move writers past fear of the blank page. Is easy to adopt! Instructors receive a one-of-a-kind manual that's thorough and insightful – reflecting the editor's years of teaching experience – to help them design dynamic syllabuses.

From award-winning writer Debra Monroe comes a funny and poignant story of a woman's quest to find a physical and emotional home.

Maddie, a refugee from two marriages, wanders from place to place seeking new options and new connections. She eventually settles in a cozy old neighborhood in Tucson, gets a job, and contemplates her life so far: a mother who's been missing for two decades, a father she rarely sees, two sisters married to the same men for fifteen years, and a circle of quirky, spiteful, but loyal friends. Just as she's trying to decide whether she's actually "at home" in Tucson, she receives a phone call that sends her on another journey -- one that takes her both physically and emotionally into the past and affords her a glimpse of a newfangled future.

In the lavishly acclaimed collection of short stories A Wild, Cold State, Flannery O'Connor Award -- winning author Debra Monroe takes us into the lives of women striving for love and emotional fulfillment amidst a forbidding topography of glacial winds and stormY, unpredictable men.

Set in rural Wisconsin, these interwoven tales run a gamut of moods and textures, ranging from the warmly nostalgic "The World's Great Love Novels, " in which the young narrator observes the extreme compromises adults make in the name of love, to the hard-edged and gritty "Crossroads Cafe, " in which a waitress searches for tenderness, though nothing in her life so far suggests that tenderness is available.

Rendered in a spare and poetic style and marked by a nuanced grasp of relationships and the vagaries of desire, the stories in A Wild, Cold State offer a familiar and resonant portrayal of the complexities of everyday life and the fundamental human need for connection.

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career-if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she's still bluecollar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as ""liberated"". Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us "to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn't. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.