Brad Kessler is a critically acclaimed novelist whose work has been translated into several languages. He won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction for his novel Birds in Fall (2006), A Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Whiting Writer’s Award.

He is an educator and farmer and author of the literary non-fiction Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. His other books include: North, a novel (2021) a finalist for 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction and the 2022 Vermont Book Award; Lick Creek (2001), a novel, and The Woodcutter’s Christmas (2001). He is the editor and co-creator of Deep North: Stories of Somali Resettlement in Vermont (2023). His work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Lit Hub. He’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.

He teaches creative writing at the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and has lectured at, among other places, Northwestern University, Smith College, the New School University, and the Kenyan Writer’s Workshop. He is a graduate of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma and runs a small goat dairy in Southwestern Vermont alongside the photographer and activist, Dona Ann McAdams.

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Dona Ann McAdams has been making photographs for over fifty years, her work exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center for Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among other places.

Her books include Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (Saint Lucy Books, 2024) and Caught in the Act (Aperture, 1996). She is the recipient of a Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for her performance photography, and grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council.

Since 1983, she has been committed to bringing cameras and photography into small, underserved communities, setting up community darkrooms and teaching people how to shoot, process, and develop their own film and document their own lives. She has worked in places as diverse as adult homes for people living with mental illness, homeless shelters, small mountain communities in Appalachia, dairy farms in New England, and on the backstretch of thoroughbred racetracks.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The London Times, Art Forum, Doubletake, and Aperture. She has taught and lectured at, among other places, Rutgers University, New York University, The International Center for Photography, The American Center in Barcelona, Spain, and Hostos Community College, New York City.

She lives on a goat farm in Vermont.

For more information, visit https://www.donaannmcadams.com

Publisher: Galpón Press (October 14, 2025)

Distributor: The Stable Book Group through Simon & Schuster

Length: 60 pages

Price: $19.95

ISBN: 9798992468700

ebook ISBN: 979-8-3372-0384-3

Each year the woodcutter came to our corner. He'd arrive on the first of December, a songbird out of season, in his old Ford truck filled with Christmas trees. He'd set up his stock beneath our window, angling firs and spruces against a wooden staging. He'd unload a netting barrel, an aluminum lawn chair, his hand saw and axe. Then he'd snake electric lights over his trees to make a kind of arcade over the sidewalk. Overnight the air on Avenue A became scented with balsam and spruce so it seemed by morning a forest had sprung up spontaneously on our street...