Order these titles now.  Available internationally,  at Waterstones, Amazon, B&N, BookShop.org, Powell's, Abe's Books and other online sellers.  Also available through order from your local independent bookstores. 

Sowilo Press

Sowilo Press is named for Sowilo, an Old Norse rune associated with the sun, and standing for the force of fire and passion in the physical and mental world. This imprint is dedicated to promoting writing by and about women, both fiction and nonfiction.  It is the imprint which will publish our Eludia Award winning titles.  For more information about The Eludia Award, please see our blog.  NOTE: Our books are available internationally, and we encourage purchase from independent booksellers.  Our authors are available for interviews, appearances, book clubs and other events.  Please contact us to discuss.  

  • Her Story: Essays on the Goddess in Our Lives, by Annabel Lindy. HER STORY is a collection of essays focused on various aspects of the Great Goddess as they were experienced and understood in the pre-patriarchal world, and as they continue to be experienced in our lives today. Annabel Lindy examines the Goddess's presence and influence through topics of Greek mythology, Biblical passages, ritual sacrifice, sacred dance, modern holiday practices—even the root meaning of wishing wells. Lindy's conversational voice and ease of delivery makes HER STORY read like a letter from a friend, and conveys her passionate engagement with the extensive material she has brought together here. Available in the U.S. and internationally at Amazon, Barnes & Noble,  BookShop.Org and other sellers online and by order.  
  • Other Likely Stories, by Debra Leigh Scott. In this collection of interrelated stories, two sisters, Rachael and Midgy Meade—military brats during the anti-war Vietnam era— struggle toward adulthood living in and around military posts in the Deep South. Their bi-racial cousin, Marlena Galloway, misspends much of her youth searching for a runaway mother. Set largely in the 1960s, during times of great political and cultural rupture, the stories explore how the chaos of social change impacts the fragile interior lives of the young. Against this setting, dark family troubles—incest, addiction, violence, mental illness—are woven through with the incandescent hope for happiness and love.  Available in the U.S. and internationally at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookShop.org and other sellers online and by order.
  • We'll Go to Coney Island, a novel in stories by Barbara Scheiber. At the dawn of the twentieth century, with only the force of his charm, intellect and “golden tongue,” Aaron Gershon escapes the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side. Courting the women who love him with promises and dreams, Aaron leaves a tide of longing in his wake. Emerging from his shadow, each of them works to shape a new life through resilience, courage and love. Available in the U.S. and internationally at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookShop and at other sellers online and by order.  
​Inscription by Christine Whittemore, winner of our Eludia Award, tells the intertwining stories of two women, living two thousand 
years apart. Aubrey writes at the end of the twentieth century, interpreting a 
hitherto unknown ancient manuscript. Marina is the scribe who writes that
 manuscript at the end of the first century AD, from her exile on an Italian island. As Aubrey transcribes Marina's struggle to survive in the ancient Roman world, her own buried story emerges. Her commentary on the manuscript becomes an encounter with a loss she has tried to forget. The two women touch across the centuries; Marina's two-thousand-year-old words change Aubrey's life. sellers online and by order.  Available in the U.S. and internationally at Waterstones,  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookShop and at other sellers online and through order.  
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Sleepers Awake by Tree Riesener, inaugural winner of our Eludia Award, is a collection of short stories that explore the varying experiences of spirituality, religion and belief in an increasingly cynical and secular world.  Comic, engaging and disquieting, Tree's stories have been compared with Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain.  With her deep and abiding love of her quirky characters and a poet's eye for the beauty of language, Tree provides us with stories that abide and resonate.  Jacob Appel says, "Sleepers Awake is a necessary collection for our times, and a darn pleasurable read." Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookShop, and other sellers, both online and by order. 
 The Accidental Wife by Orla McAlinden, winner of the Third Eludia Award, as well as winner of the prestigious Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award, Short Story of 2016 prize for "The Visit", included in The Accidental Wife.  Set against the tense background of Northern Ireland's Troubles, The Accidental Wife follows the twists and turns of the McCann family over seven decades. How many generations will these secrets destroy? Marion Smith has a secret. So does Colette McCann. Why did Matthew Jordan slip his passport into his pocket before he kissed his wife goodbye and drove to work? In a land riddled with suspicion and fear, secrets are not easy to keep. How long can Marion Smith hide what happened in Derry at the height of the Second World War? How many generations will her secret destroy? Lies, half-truths and omissions litter the stories of the McCann family, spanning seventy years of Northern Ireland's turbulent history. Who will come through unscathed and who will pay for the sins of the fathers? Available at BookShop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other sellers, both online and by order.  
 Ruby Hands​ by Cheryl Romo, winner of our Fourth Eludia Award.  A mystery set on reservation territory, the novel tells the story of Daisy Sandoval, a young mother who teaches school on the reservation in Arizona, who is found near death in a ravine.  Tribal members suspect foul play and focus on Harlan Sandoval, Daisy’s ex-husband, a defrocked Pentecostal preacher who now heads a family-run criminal gang on the reservation. Upon her death, Kate Thorsen, Daisy's aunt, works with a Mojave Shaman to solve her murder.   The novel explores the deep differences in the cultural and spiritual beliefs of the natives on the reservation and the outsiders who try to impose their own rules and values on them.  Available at BookShop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other sellers, both online and by order.  

In Progress by Catharine Leggett, winner of our Fifth Eludia Award.  A collection of short stories set in a changing and rapidly modernizing rural Canadian landscape, these tales explore the lives, the dreams, the struggles and the strength of the families facing a transforming society and a sometimes baffling unfolding of modernity.  Told largely through the lives of the women and girls trying to find their place in this new world, Leggett examines the often unseen and unspoken humanity standing defiant in the face of a world heedlessly altering what is real and what is not.  ​Available at BookShop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other sellers, both online and by order. 

The Emigrant and Other Stories by Justine Dymond, winner of our Sixth Eludia Award. The stories in this collection range widely in setting and era, including France during World War II, Maine in the early eighteenth century, and Tennessee in the twenty-first century. What the stories all have in common, however, are characters who experience life as foreigners, whether in their own countries or not, and who long for a real or imaginary "elsewhere". Each character has a different impulse that propels their longing. Each story represents a border experience, imposed from the outside or inside, that paradoxically confines and propagates the human desire to be somewhere else. Available at all online booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as through order at all brick and mortar stores. 



COMING IN 2022: 
After some COVID delays, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of the winners of our Seventh and Eighth Eludia Awards, Crazy Mountain, by Elise Atchison (Winter 2022) and Home is a Made-Up Place by Ronit Plank (Spring 2022)  




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Praise for our authors and titles:
​For Her Story
“Annabel Lindy brings the Goddess once again back to Her true place, in the center of our lives. Annabel’s love for the ancient, timeless ways of the Goddess shines through in all her re-tellings.” 
      — Rachel Pollack, author of The Body of the Goddess

​For Other Likely Stories:
 “In these vivid, Southern-laced stories, the author has created characters both believable and moving, as she follows them through their harsh, secretive and passionate lives against the backdrop of the soldier-families fighting the Vietnam War.” 
      —Caroline Seebohm, author of Last Romantics   and   The Innocents: A Novel 

For We'll Go to Coney Island:
"The stories of Barbara Scheiber come from a special place. They are the work of a wisdom figure, a woman who understands from the inside out the beautiful imperfections of family life. Yet they are rendered with rare vision that sees everything as if the experiences were brand new." 
     --Roy Peter Clark, Vice President and Senior Scholar at the Poynter       Institute and author of The Glamour of Grammar and Writing Tools

About Inscription:
"Clean, lean, superb prose; the ...subtle interweaving of the stories of two women divided by two millennia but drawn together by circumstance. … .(an) unusual and deeply moving historical novel."
  ---Kevin Crossley-Holland, poet, and author of The Seeing Stone, and The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of Childhood.

About Sleepers Awake: 
"In this sometimes comic, sometimes disquieting, always engaging story collection, Tree Riesener  blends a wild narrative drive with a poet's precision with language. These stories view the sacred, the profane, and the seemingly ordinary through a wonderfully warped lens." -David Hallock Sanders, founding director of Writing Aloud, Philadelphia

"Tree Riesener's Sleepers Awake offers a wry, mordant and insightful examination of what faith means in an increasingly secular, doubting society.  Her tales are as original as the best of Flannery O'Connor and her wit reminiscent of James Thurber at his most irascible. ...  Sleepers Awake is a necessary collection for our times and a darn pleasurable read. -Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck, Einstein's Beach House

For the Accidental Wife
“….a remarkably mature depth of voice and narrative range for a debut writer with its lyrical and intelligent insights into Northern Ireland’s history and present-day
struggles.” Anthony J. Quinn

"...it is this sense of expansive insight which distinguishes the collection. The ease with which McAlinden inhabits a wide range of narrative voices speaks to her talent and ear. That this is only her first collection hints at further development of a new and exciting voice in Irish fiction..."  Conor O'Donovan

"...The Accidental Wife is a raw and inspirational read. The stories vary in pace and length, but each one is as deserved as the last. The characters are brought to life using vivid and precise prose, with a litany of deceit, despair and disappointment blended in. There are lighter moments peppered throughout, lending a more relaxed feel to the collection but the underlying atmosphere is one of tension. This is an author with a sharp, concise and engaging literary edge. McAlinden is sure to impress with her debut and is definitely one to watch out for. Highly recommended."    Margaret Madden

For Ruby Hands:  
"...Set in the one-horse town of Mesquite in the desert of Northern Arizona, this book could be set nowhere else: the heat, the sand, the sweltering overpowering sense of desolation speaks strongly throughout.
And the location is pivotal to one of the central themes of the book: the lives of the indigenous American population, Mohave and other desert tribes, who eke out a living on the reservation just beyond the limits of Mesquite. There is a wealth of research, or perhaps a deep personal understanding, of the habits and belief systems of the book’s native American characters and of the many and varied difficulties they face, as they try to co-exist uneasily with the poor and resentful non-native inhabitants of the town of Mesquite. .."  O. McAlinden, GoodReads. 

For  In Progress:
The stories that make up Catharine Leggett’s masterly new collection,
In Progress, demonstrate the writer’s ability to convey, within the confines of
a single narrative, the entirety of the lives of the girls and women who make up her subjects—unlikely narrators who are, nevertheless, heartbreakingly reliable. Just as each part of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, it also includes the entire object. So, too, do these stories. Chronic disappointment metastasizes into a bedrock of scar tissue to found a life upon; self-sacrifice goes postal; and no one is who they seem—you may never look at the woman who tops your coffee off at the donut shop the same, or the checkout girl at the grocery store. Meticulously crafted, humane, but never sentimental, and firmly anchored in its time and place, In Progress gives the reader much to ponder and even more to savour.
—Melissa Hardy, author of A Cry of Bees, Broken Road, Surface Rights, Constant Fire, The Uncharted Heart, and others

For The Emigrant and Other Stories:
"Justine Dymond's The Emigrant and Other Stories traverses a breathtaking span of time, geography and emotion with authority and insight. Her compelling characters-a unwelcome minister's wife in colonial New England, an American teacher at a French prison, wedding guests forced to confront the conduct of their countrymen during World War II-find themselves navigating precarious new worlds, worlds that the author imagines with vivid precision unequalled in contemporary fiction. This is a masterful collection from a gifted stylist who knows the plants of western Tennessee, the rants of eastern Ireland, and the mysteries of the human psyche that draw people to distant lands. The Emigrant and Other Stories is as masterful, convincing and deeply nuanced a debut collection as any in recent memory."

--Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein's Beach House

"With a keen eye and nuanced prose, Dymond imbues The Emigrant and Other Stories with an immediacy and intimacy which fascinates. Her stories' astonishing breadth in style, time, and place allow Dymond to examine from all angles the powerful drive that propels us away from the familiar. Her characters inhabit different cultures, locations, and time periods, yet all are united, as we all are, by the eternal, universal search for a place we can call home."

Allison Amend
Author of Enchanted Islands, A Nearly Perfect Copy, Stations West, and Things That Pass for Love