Gabriel Bump and Abigail Chabitnoy, assistant professors of English in the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers, each have new books set to be released on Nov. 10. 

Image

“Don’t Stop Snowing,” Bump’s third novel published by Algonquin Books, is “a deeply personal and funny novel about the struggles we all face as we realize that we don’t just inherit eye, hair, and skin color, but also the complicated psyches of our parents.” The Library Review says “Don’t Stop Snowing” is a “beautifully episodic meditation on family, healing, and finding purpose. [The novel is] highly recommended for all literary fiction collections.”

An alumnus of the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers program, Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His debut novel, “Everywhere You Don’t Belong,” was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. His second novel, “The New Naturals,” was a Washington Post, Boston Globe, and New York Times Notable Book of 2023. Bump’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

Bump has two upcoming public readings for “Don’t Stop Snowing,” at 7 p.m. on Nov. 11 at Odyssey Bookshop, and at 6 p.m. on Dec. 3 at Old Chapel as part of the MFA’s Visiting Writers Series.

Image

Chabitnoy’s “Love Like a Body Carried to Shore” is her third poetry collection with Wesleyan University Press. This newest collection is described by its publisher as “an invitation to listen” and an “ecologically and emotionally charged collection” that “explores continuity through water and weather, through the intimacies of relation, where knowing is a bodied verb.” 

“Moving with a tidal rhythm across its undivided form, the book weaves ancestral memory with myth,” the publisher writes of the book. “Grounded in the work of environmental witness, it extends its meditation to the permeability between human and animal. Domestic spaces blur with the mythic. The self emerges inside the landscape. This collection is an elegy for a broken world and all it—we—might still become.”

Chabitnoy is the author of “In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful” (Wesleyan 2022), the linocut-illustrated chapbook “Converging Lines of Light” (Flower Press 2020), and “How to Dress a Fish” (Wesleyan 2019), which was the winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry.

A Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, in addition to being on faculty in the UMass MFA, Chabtnoy is a mentor for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing.

“Don’t Stop Snowing” is available for pre-order from Algonquin Books, and “Love Like a Body Carried to Shore” is available from Wesleyan University Press.