Angela Palm is the author “Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here” and winner of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
She grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the neighbor boy and loved him in secret, imagining a life with him even as she longed for a future that held more than a job at the neighborhood bar. For Palm, caught in this landscape of flood and drought, escape was a continually receding hope.
Though she did escape, as an adult Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins. But this means more than just recalling vibrant, complicated memories of the place that shaped her, or trying to understand the family that raised her. It means visiting the prison where the boy that she loved is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder. It means trying to chart what happens when a single event forces the path of her life off course.
Raised in the rural Midwest, Angela Palm earned a BA in English Literature and a BS in Criminal Justice at Saint Joseph's College. Palm is the author of Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here, recipient of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize (Graywolf Press, Aug. 2016). Palm is the editor of a book featuring work by Vermont writers, called Please Do Not Remove (Wind Ridge Books, 2014). She has taught creative writing at Champlain College, New England Young Writers' Conference, The Writers' Barn, and The Renegade Writers' Collective. She is a recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship in nonfiction.
Palm's writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Ecotone, At Length Magazine, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, Paper Darts, apt, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Little Fiction, Big Truths, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and nonfiction, a Derringer Award, Best of the Net, and the Best Short Fictions anthology. Angela Palm owns Ink + Lead Literary Services. She lives in Burlington, Vermont.
