New Book Releases from Patrick Phillips and Jonathan Escoffery

The 2022-2023 academic year is on the horizon! Along with the start of school, we celebrate two new book releases from Patrick Phillips, Director of the Creative Writing Program, and Jonathan Escoffery, Stegner Fellow in Fiction.

Song of the Closing Doors by Patrick Phillips

“Song of the Closing Doors reckons with love, loss, and the space between the two that we call life. It’s a deep comfort to rock next to Patrick Phillips in these poignant, sleek poems that travel through grief’s tunnels. Clear a space for these blues and warm yourself in their everlasting light.” —Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete

Patrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of three poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Chattahoochee, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Phillips had received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, and the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

"If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level." —Ann Patchett

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a collection of humorous and harrowing linked stories following a Jamaican-American family as they seek stability upon moving to Miami, navigating cultural dislocation, tenuous family ties, and the many, conflicting meanings of Black American identity, published by MCD/FSG, as well as the forthcoming novel, Play Stone Kill Bird. He is the winner of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, AGNI, The Best American Magazine Writing 2020, and elsewhere. He is a Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.