Winner of the 2019 CSU Poetry Center Essay Collection competition, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib.
“Telephone is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“Miller and Wade’s Telephone is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays—are they essays? watch them essai—pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love.” —Lily Hoang
“Miller and Wade’s marvelous Telephone takes the ordinary—cars, exercise, toys, sex—and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. Telephone stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative’s thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story.” —James Allen Hall
Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, most recently An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016). She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her poetry chapbook The Daughters of Elderly Women received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press award. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, including the memoir Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and the poetry collection Skirted (The Word Works, 2021). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach.
