Press Release: Local Author Phillip Sterling Releases New Book

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A publication party for Michigan author Phillip Sterling’s new book, Amateur Husbandry, will be held at LowellArts (223 W, Main Street, Lowell) on Thursday, October 24, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Open to the public, the event will include a brief reading from the book at 7 p.m., refreshments, and door prizes. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the pre-order discount price of $12.

Amateur Husbandry is a collection of thirty-eight fable-like micro-fictions—stories the length of paragraphs—narrated by the marital partner of a yellow horse. Described as “playful,” “sly,” and “occasionally silly,” the stories “do what short-short stories do best,” writes award-winning author Marc J. Sheehan, “they push beyond their compression to create a fully realized world, putting both our foibles and our mercies on display.”

Among the animals encountered in Amateur Husbandry—in addition to the yellow horse, a character based loosely on Socrates’ wife Xanthippe—are a flour-borrowing woodchuck, a dog that raises goldfish as a 4H project, an entrepreneurial seagull, and a goat that wants to be Theodore Roosevelt for Halloween.

Phillip Sterling’s previous books include a collection of fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told, published by Wayne State University Press (Made in Michigan Series), two full-length collections of poetry, Mutual ShoresAnd Then Snow, and four chapbook-length series of poems. He is the editor of Isle Royale from the AIR: Poems, Stories, and Songs from 25 Years of Artists-in-Residence (Caffeinated Press).

Sterling lists among his awards a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, and a Michigan Association of Governing Boards Distinguished Faculty Award. He has served as artist-in-residence for both Isle Royale National Park and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Professor Emeritus at Ferris State University since his retirement in 2013, he lives with his wife, Jane Wheeler, on a bit of acreage in Lowell Township, where they attend to a number of gardens and animals of questionable domesticity.

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