About this item

A student at NYU in Greenwich Village, Liz McLane is pursuing her dream of becoming a poet and, at the same time, determined to find her birth mother, no matter what the results may be. Through her journals, Liz records her struggle to navigate adoption bureaucracy and laws. In spare and poignant poems, she confides her fears and her prayers. Could her birth mother be the unknown guitarist in Washington Square Park, who sings a soulful song in a strangely familiar voice? Against a backdrop of college life classes on Alice Munro and Billy Collins and an active social life and with the help of her sister, friends, and a private investigator, Liz summons the courage to face the truth about her mother and herself. This is an unforgettable novel full of heart that addresses the primary questions all adoptees must answer for themselves: who was the woman who gave me life, and why did she decide to give me away? Based on author Meg Kearney s own experiences.



About the Author

Meg Kearney

Meg Kearney's most recent collection of poems for adults, Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009) , was winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award; it was also a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year. The title poem of Home By Now is included in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems: American Places anthology (Viking Penguin 2011) . Her first book of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions, 2001) , features a foreword by Donald Hall. Meg is also author of the Lizzie McLane Trilogy, a series of verse novels for young adults, all by Persea Books: The Secret of Me (2005) , The Girl in the Mirror (2012) , and When You Never Said Goodbye (2017) . Her story "Chalk" appears in Sudden Flash Youth:65 Short Short Stories (Persea 2011) . Meg's first picture book, Trouper (the Three-Legged Dog) , was published by Scholastic in fall 2013 and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Winner of the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the Missouri Association of School Librarias' Show Me Reader Award, Trouper has been been selected as one of the Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People of 2014; one of the most "Diverse and Impressive Picture Books of 2013" by the International Reading Association, and one of the 2013-14 season's best picture books by the Christian Science Monitor, the Cooperative Children's Book Center, and Bank Street College of Education. It is also a Nominee for the 2014-2015 Alabama Camellia Children's Choice Book Award (Grades 2-3) and a Preliminary Nominee for the 2015-2016 Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL) Readers Award (Show Me Readers, Grades 1-3) . Meg's poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, on Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" series, and on Garrison Keillor's "A Writer's Almanac," and has been featured in myriad anthologies, including The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006) , and Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, 2007) . Her nonfiction essay, "Hello, Mother, Goodbye," appears The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion (Helicon Nine Press, 2007) . She is Founding Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. For eleven years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Meg lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their three-legged black Lab, Trouper; their three-legged cat, Hopkins; and, oddly, their four-legged cat, Magpie.



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