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News: Texas Review Press to publish short story collection by Roane State’s Genovise

Elizabeth Genovise

April 7, 2018

By Bob Fowler
Roane State staff writer

Inspiration for Roane State assistant professor Elizabeth Genovise’s enthralling short stories can come from her scrolls through the online marketplace Craigslist or shopping trips at Kroger’s.

Then, there’s the more conventional source of her creativity: her dreams. She keeps a notebook by her bed to jot down those mental visions upon awakening. “Sparks of humanity” can emerge, she says. “I don’t want those little moments to slip away.”

Genovise’s latest collection of nine short stories, titled “Posing Nude for the Saints,” will be published by Texas Review Press in Spring 2019. It’s already winning rave reviews. Fellow author Steve Yates enthuses over “the humanity, the yearning, the raw spirituality" of the characters in her stories.

Brief summaries of her short stories offer intriguing glimpses into them: the daughter of a prostitute falls in love with a Mennonite; a divorcee responds to a Craigslist ad for boudoir photography; a family vacation in a landscape that foreshadows their collapse; a cynical lawyer is given the opportunity to save a life.

One story, "Irises," won the prestigious O. Henry Prize for short stories deemed of exceptional merit, and Genovise has placed in numerous other literary contests.

“Vincent,” another story in her new book, was inspired by Genovise’s discovery of her week-old grocery shopping list tucked in a shelf at Kroger’s. Her students also often tell her stories that she weaves into her fiction, she said.

Genovise has taught at Roane State for eight years; the last three as an assistant professor of English on the college’s Roane County campus. She teaches English composition and literature.

Two other books of short stories – “A Different Harbor (Mayapple Press 2014) and “Where There Are Two or More” (Fomite Press, 2015) – are on her resume.

​In short stories, Genovise said, “Every single word has to count.” She’s now making the challenging transition from short stories to novels. She is writing a novel about a broken family running an inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina.

“I have so many books in the works it’s ridiculous,” she said.

For her, writing fiction is “like a puzzle.” She says there’s an “incubation period where I write pages and pages of notes. It’s a huge mess, with arrows in the margins pointing different ways.”

“One day, it’s ready and I sit down and write.”

Like her other published works, Genovise’s latest effort will be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. To learn more, visit www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org.​

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