About this item
In this powerful and unforgettable memoir, award-winning writer Amy Butcher examines the shattering consequences of failing a friend when she felt he needed one most. Four weeks before their college graduation, twenty-one-year-old Kevin Schaeffer walked Amy Butcher to her home in their college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hours after parting ways with Amy, he fatally stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein. While he was awaiting trial, psychiatrists concluded that he had suffered an acute psychotic break. Although severely affected by Kevin's crime, Amy remained devoted to him as a friend, believing that his actions were the direct result of his untreated illness. Over time, she became obsessed - determined to discover the narrative that explained what Kevin had done.
About the Author
Amy E. Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Mothertrucker (Little A Books, November 2021) , which in July 2019 was acquired by Makeready Films for film development with Primetime Emmy-winning Jill Soloway directing and Academy and Golden Globe-winning actress Julianne Moore in a starring role. In February 2020, the Ohio Arts Council awarded excerpts of Mothertrucker an Individual Excellence Award, calling the book "well researched," "very well-written," and "a positive antidote to the trauma of violence against women." Her first book, Visiting Hours (Blue Rider Press/Penguin-Random House, 2015) , earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Most recently, her January 2019 essay "Flight Path" was awarded grand prize in The Sonora Review's flash prose contest, and her May 2018 essay, "Women These Days," was thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice nominated for inclusion in the Best American Essays series by the editors at Brevity. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio and the BBC, anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2016, and awarded grand prize in the 2016 Solas Awards' "Best of Travel Writing" series and the 2014 Iowa Review Award as judged by David Shields. Her essays have also been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 editions of the Best American Essays series. Additional essays have appeared in Granta, Harper's, The New York Times "Modern Love," The New York Times Sunday Review, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, The Paris Review online, Tin House online, and Brevity, among others. Her 2016 op-ed, "Emoji Feminism," published in the New York Times Sunday Review, was cited by Google as the inspiration for eleven new professional female-empowered emojis, accepted by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in July 2016 and incorporated in January 2017 in all iOS software packaging internationally. Additional writing appears in The Best of Brevity, Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, The Best Travel Writing 2016, The Soul Of A Great Traveler, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, The Best of Vela,and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and is the 2012-2013 recipient of Colgate University's Olive B. O'Connor Creative Writing Fellowship in nonfiction, as well as grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. She is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor of E
