Diane Wald’s novel Gillyflower was published in April 2019 by She Writes Press, and won first place in the novella category from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, first place in the novella category from American Book Fest, first place in Fiction: Novella from International Book Awards, and a bronze medal from Reader’s Favorite. You can read more about Gillyflower at www.gillyflowernovel.com. Diane has also published more than 250 poems in literary magazines since 1966. She the recipient of a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, The Open Voice Award, and the Anne Halley Award. She also received a state grant from the Artists Foundation (Massachusetts Council on the Arts).  She has published four print chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press, and Faustinetta, Gegenschein, Trapunto from Cervena Barva Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her second book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002.  Wonderbender, her third poetry collection, was published by 1913 Press in 2011. A poetry collection, The Warhol Pillows, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A novel, My Famous Brain, is forthcoming in 2021 from She Writes Press. 

“My brain was famous, but I was not. Not every gifted child invents a pollutant-free fuel, paints a masterpiece, or finds the cure for cancer,” Jack MacLeod tells us. “Some of us just live out our lives.” Jack died in 1974; now, he’s ready to narrate his story from beyond the grave. Jack’s prodigious memory, which allows him to memorize books, and his penchant for psychic connections give him unusual insights into the events of his past life and make him fiercely curious about his current state of existence. Jack immerses us in interconnected tales of his childhood participation in a research study on the intellectually gifted, his dual career as a clinical psychologist and university professor, his participation in the unmasking of an unscrupulous colleague, his long-term health issues, his brief but life-changing love affair with a student, his deep friendship with another man, and his eventual acceptance and celebration of the circumstances of his fate. How Jack dies, and how he deals with the murder of someone close to him, mirrors how he has lived and grown, and marks the significance of everyone and everything that ultimately brings him to yet another level of brilliance.

Boston, 1984. Even in a world without cell phones, messages come through loud and clear if one is listening. When thirty-something Nora Forrest travels to Manhattan to see a Broadway play starring her idol, an aging Irish actor named Hugh Sheenan, she doesn’t know whether what happens in the theater that night should be credited to witchcraft, extrasensory perception, synchronicity, or simple accident―and she knows that many people would tell her nothing had happened at all. Told through the voices of four people, Gillyflower is a story about intersections and connections―real, imaginary, seized, and eluded. It’s a book about everyday magic, crystalline memory, and the details that flow through time and space like an electrified mist. It’s a detective story, a love story, and a coming-of-age story―for the never really young and for the almost old.