Tag: family trauma

My novel-in-verse, Bent Cedar Mountain, is officially in the world today. I’ll have a number of events this fall–readings, workshops, panels, appearances–to support this wonderful book, and I’d be happy to sign a copy for you when I see you whether you buy it today (hint, hint) or at later the event.

Early Praise for Bent Cedar Mountain

Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain is a brilliant and beguiling poetic enacting novel-in-verse. This one is a fiery and fluid winner… [and] delivers a plot-driven poetic in scintillating passages, vignettes demanding our engagement in rendering the lives impressing one another in the land rich with life and loss . . . This book is at once delightful and a great escape. A must read, share, and return to read again. What a feat!

­—Alison Hedge Coke, author of Look At This Blue

A marriage is a lot like a farm. It can be a place of tenderness—or it can be a place of cruelty. Reader, in your hands is a parable about how that choice sometimes gets taken from us, a careful tale that shows abuse takes hold quietly, through small, hidden brutalities that accumulate until you wake up one day so afraid there’s nothing left to find but courage. Writing with lush detail and exacting empathy, Julie Hensley proves with this collection that she is one of Appalachia’s premiere storytellers. Bent Cedar Mountain will break your heart.

—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis