Miriam Herin
Miriam Herin’s first novel ABSOLUTION won the 2007 Novello Press Literary Award and was cited by Publisher’s Weekly as an “impressive” debut. A native of Miami, Florida, she has been a social worker, taught composition and literature at two universities and three colleges and been on the editorial staffs of Good Housekeeping Magazine and the Winston-Salem Journal. She has also free-lanced as a writer, editor, public relations consultant and producer of films and videos. As a volunteer, she organized and directed an inner city program for teenaged children of Southeast Asian refugee families.
Her second novel A Stone for Bread was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom novel competition and was published in September, 2015 by Livingston Press of West Alabama University. |
A Stone for Bread
Literary fiction, general fiction
In the mid-1950s, Henry Beam was a promising, up-from-poverty young poet from rural North Carolina. After a study year in Paris, he returned to North Carolina to an instructorship on the Duke University faculty and soon afterwards published a collection of poems by an anonymous author, poems Beam claimed had been saved from a Nazi death camp. The ensuing authorship controversy cost Beam his job and career. Years later, in 1997, Beam breaks a decades-long silence when he begins telling UNC grad student Rachel Singer about his study year abroad where he didn’t study, where instead he fell in love with a Parisian shop girl, became entangled with a fiery right-wing French politician and encountered a strange and unnerving man known only as René who he claims gave him the poems. The story moves back and forth in time and place from North Carolina, 1950s Paris, post-World War I France and the World War II Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. |
Absolution
Literary fiction, general fiction
Called an “impressive debut” by Publishers Weekly, Miriam’s first novel Absolution tells the story of Maggie Delaney, an idealistic wife and mother whose world implodes when her husband is murdered in a seemingly random act. When Maggie attempts to find out what really happened, her search leads her back to her Carolina roots and through the streets of modern-day Boston. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, she uncovers a legacy of secrets about the man she thought she knew – and the troubled world they shared as they came of age together in America’s turbulent sixties. Absolution won the 2007 Novello Press Literary Award. The novel also received Independent Publisher‘s Gold Award for Best Fiction, Southeast Region, and was a Finalist for Foreword Magazine’s 2007 Novel of the Year. |