About the Books:

Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they let go— of sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood—as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.

The American Gun is a poem in ten parts delving into the modern phenomenon of mass shootings in the United States. It’s a narrative account of a young teacher in NYC wrestling with the reality of American gun culture. From the classroom to the subway platform, The American Gun is a meditation on tragedy and what it means to live in a country where domestic terrorism is a constant threat. Femiani’s poetry illuminates what the media cannot: the residuals of monumental loss, months and years after the fact, in the face of an unyielding “democracy” unable to protect the lives of its citizenry and its children.

About the Authors:

Ellen Stone grew up on the north branch of the Susquehanna River in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Pennsylvania. She taught in Kansas and Michigan public schools for 35 years while raising three daughters with her husband. Ellen advises a poetry club at Community High School, co-hosts a monthly poetry series, Skazat!, and is a founding editor of Public School Poetry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is the author of Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025), What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020), and The Solid Living World which won the Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press chapbook prize in 2013. Ellen’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net.

Jessica Femiani is the granddaughter of immigrants. She received her PhD in English at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her poems and essays have been published in the Paterson Literary Review, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, The Italian American Review, #MeToo, Anch’io, and Mom Egg Review. She lives in Binghamton, New York, is an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Oneonta, where she teaches composition and creative writing.