“All I’ve wanted from the beginning is just to put a human face on poverty that is not the one that we think of…” Stephanie Land, who wrote a memoir on working as a maid and being a single mother, first found an audience on her blog.

Start planning your 2019 reading schedule with Literary Hub’s exhaustive list of exciting future releases — including numerous titles by women writers and writers of color.

“A simple question, posed at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. I got 5,000 comments back.” At the Village Voice, Mikel Jollett writes on music’s power to evoke memory and a sense of loss.

The creator of The Wire and Treme remembers his years of friendship and collaboration with the late Anthony Bourdain.

Heather Thomson at Commonplace Book Blog explores fact, memory, and imagination in creative nonfiction: “But there is a middle ground, one which is perhaps the most difficult to do well, but the one I feel is most rewarding as a reader, and perhaps most faithful to how the mind works.”

“Books and articles have been written about reverse culture shock. The identity crisis. . . . I find this state of consciousness intriguing rather than distressing. The thrill of disorientation and shattered perceptions. Besides, I never fit in to begin with.” J.D. Riso returns home after 19 years of a nomadic life.

“It’s easier to regain the immediacy of something that’s in the near distant past than it is to step away from the immediacy of something ongoing.” Rebecca Moon Ruark chats with David Giffels on memoir writing, journaling, loss, and how he enlisted his dad to help him build his own casket.

Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life. “His whole life, my Uncle Lee harbored dreams of being a writer, and I had, in desperate fits and starts over the years, become one.”

Writer Shawn McClure remembers baby chicks: “In the basement of his old farmhouse, my grandfather had a brooder. It looked like a multi-storied apartment building for chicks. They would crowd around the light bulb for heat, like yellow electrons darting around a red nucleus.”

“I remember going for a walk in the woods behind my house instead, finding this tree and carving my initials into it, pressing the sadness and rejection into its innocent bark.” At Kindred, Kerstin Pless Grant recalls being 14 and rediscovers a tree she had hoped to return to someday.

John Sutherland reflects on 26 years with the Metropolitan Police Service in London, England: “That’s the painful privilege of this job – to venture repeatedly into the hurting places. To be there on the inside of the fluttering blue and white tape.”