What does love look like in adulthood? Sometimes many splendored, often mucho complicated. “These essays sizzle with urgency, honesty, lust, and release. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a collection where all the essayists bare themselves with such profound vulnerability. Here we are reminded of our first crushes, our first mistakes, and our repeated attempts to navigate toward the best versions of ourselves. Jennifer Niesslein has created a far-ranging anthology that showcases talented essayists doing what we all do: grapple with the leaps we’ve made and the lengths we’ll go to outrun the falls.” —Jill Talbot, the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir "Everyone has a story to tell, and when those individual stories are told well they transcend the particular. In Soul Mate 101, each story of love lost and love found, of sexual desire and spiritual connection, becomes universal. Here, desire evolves—or doesn’t—sometimes years after it begins as puppy love. These 21 outstanding writers explore love and sex in language whose rhythm ranges from sensuous to urgent. Soul Mate 101 is an advanced class in the longings of the human heart." —Sue William Silverman, author, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction
Authors
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss (Overcup Press). Earlier books include the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis (Beacon Press), the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns (Black Lawrence Press), shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press), the craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne) and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt BYR), chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Gayle's essays, poetry, and short fiction have been widely published in places such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Rumpus, Salon, and more, and have received numerous honors, including the Columbia Journal Nonfiction Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2016, 2019, and 2020, the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award and the 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer Award. She was named A Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine, and served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014, focusing on bringing writing workshops to underserved communities. Gayle teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University and University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She currently lives in Highland Park, IL with her husband and youngest child.
Dionne Ford is author of the forthcoming memoir Go Back and Get It (Bold Type Books 2023) and co-editor of the anthology Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, New Jersey Monthly, Rumpus and Ebony among other publications and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2018, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA from Fordham University where she is an adjunct professor. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.
