The award-winning autobiographical novel, “Riverine,” written by Saint Joseph’s College alumna, Angela Williams Palm ’04, is scheduled to come out just over a year from now, in the spring of 2016. The book was recently awarded the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and tells the story of a girl growing up and maturing in a small rural Indiana town on the Kankakee River. “Riverine” was selected to receive this prestigious award over hundreds of other manuscripts, and Palm will receive a $12,000 advance in addition to the book’s upcoming publication.
“Riverine” describes the life of a girl growing up in rural Indiana. Using the Kankakee River as a symbol, it portrays girls and women from rural Indiana as people who always return to their origins and applies this symbol to Palm’s own experiences through a collection of memoirs and narrative essays. According to judge, Brigid Hughes, “'Riverine' is a beautiful book—both expansive and intimate—about homecoming and departure, the American ideal of reinvention and the ways we are bound to and bound by the past.”
A 2004 graduate of Saint Joseph’s College, Angela Palm completed an English Literature-Criminal Justice double major and then moved on to work in the fields of both politics and editing. Currently, she owns Ink & Led Literary Services and teaches writing workshops. Prior to finishing “Riverine,” Palm also edited an anthology featuring the work of Vermont writers called “Please Do Not Remove,” which was published in 2014.
