Jess Bowers

Luke Rolfes from Laurel Review and I discuss story structure, dead horses, and my research process in this new interview all about HORSE SHOW, out 4/9/24 from SFWP! (Although a little bird told me fifty copies will be available at AWP for sale and signing…)

I’m almost done with the final pass of edits on Horse Show, which taught me that I’m metaphorically obsessed with the slow grace of whales and materially obsessed with gutta-percha, India rubber, Naugahyde, and other obsolete industrial products.

In the meantime, the fine folks over at SFWP have been busy bees getting Horse Show ready for preorder on all the major platforms, which you can do RIGHT NOW! Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, heck, even SFWP’s own website–any of these links will take you to a website where you can pre-order your very own copy of Horse Show, my critically acclaimed collection of short fiction about historical horses from TV, film, and photography, out April 9, 2024.

But just like LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it!

Here’s what some of the awesome folks who’ve read Horse Show so far think:

“Jess Bowers’s striking debut collection Horse Show explores horse as vehicle, as spectacle, as animal, and as companion, illuminating how humans have loved and failed our hoofed familiars…Bowers’s compassionate and precise eye brings horses of historical record to life, animating human cruelties and unexpected tendernesses.” -Kate McIntyre, author of Mad Prairie, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

“With the precise detail of a historian and the lyricism of a poet, Bowers drops a lariat around these moments in time. The stories she offers are horse stories, but, in the end, they are the stories of us.”  –Luke Rolfes, author of Sleep Lake, Impossible Naked Life, and Flyover Country

“Bowers dramatizes the equine esoterica she has unearthed with the most consummate skill. Highly original…quirky, fascinating, easy to read and hard to forget.” -Madison Smartt Bell, National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Finalist, author of the All Souls Rising trilogy

Lots of other exciting irons in the fire! Stay tuned to my Twitter (I refuse to call it X), Instagram, and Facebook for updates and cute pictures of Teddy the Haflinger.

It’s been a wild few months working with the wonderful people at Santa Fe Writers Project to get Horse Show shiny for publication day, which I’m thrilled to say will be April 9th, 2024!

I promise to share a pre-order link here as soon as I get one. These things take time, as I’ve been learning…!

First, there was the cover design process. SFWP is known for producing eye-catching story collections, so I was surprised by the free rein I was given when brainstorming for the cover. Designer Gwen Grafft was patient and meticulous in translating my vague ideas about “vibes” into a really special cover. It’s got letterpress! Horse diving! A sense of spectacle, history, and danger!

I’m basically obsessed, and it’s taking every ounce of willpower I have to hide it from you all until the right time comes. But come it shall!

Once the cover was nailed down, the manuscript went into edits, proofreading, layout and more edits, which are still happening. In the meantime, I got to ask all my favorite fictioneers if they’d like a galley to read and/or blurb or place atop a stack gathering dust in the corner of their office and forget about. Said galleys hit the mail earlier this week, and according to all the awesome writers who have gotten theirs so far, summer reading is a “go!”

I also had to get this professional author photo taken, even though the selfie I’ve been using makes me look like Wednesday Addams, which is honestly on brand.

Apart from all that, I’m just out here in Missouri reading, writing, obsessing over my heirloom tomato vines, and riding Teddy when it’s not so hot out we both call it quits.

More news as I have it!

Each spring, a cohort of creative writing students at Maryville University, St. Louis work to assemble the latest issue of Magnolia, a student-run magazine featuring the artwork and writing of Maryville students, faculty, and alumni. The magazine’s 2023 issue, its nineteenth, comes out next week!

To celebrate, Magnolia‘s talented student editors are hosting a launch party for contributors to read accepted work. Most of the fiction included came out of my Writing Fiction class this semester, which has been one of those rare, magical workshops that basically runs itself, featuring inspiring guest appearances by Luke Rolfes, Niki Herd, and Bess Winter.

Although I didn’t submit anything to the magazine this year, I’m tickled pink that my students invited me to join in and read something from my forthcoming collection, Horse Show.

The launch party is free and open to the public, so come get your new copy of Magnolia and congratulate our student writers and editors!

“One Trick Pony,” my short story about the horrific making of the movie Jesse James (1939), has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Ashland Creek Press, which anthologized the story in Among Animals 3.

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is one of the most honored literary projects in America, collecting the finest work from small literary magazines across the nation.

This is my fourth Pushcart nomination, and the second for “One Trick Pony.”

My short story manuscript, Horse Show, made the long list for the Santa Fe Writers’ Project’s annual Literary Award, judged this year by Deesha Philyaw.

Although the MS didn’t make the shortlist, making the long list means the book stood out among more than 2,000 entries!

Good job, Horse Show. >pat pat<

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of Among Animals 3: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, a new anthology just out from Ashland Creek Press!

In it, you’ll find “One Trick Pony,” my short story about a 1930s stunt horse’s ill-fated run-in with the Lake of the Ozarks. This story was originally published in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, where it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

This is the second Among Animals anthology that features my fiction–you can find “Shooting A Mule” in Among Animals 2.