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Call It Horses: Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction


Call It Horses, Jessie van Eerden’s newest novel and winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, was released on March 23, 2021. “Filled with poetry, working-class grit, and undogmatic spirituality, this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.” –John Englehardt (Bloomland)

“Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics—family, history, grief—their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace.” –Michael Parker (Prairie Fever and All I Have in This World)


Jessie’s collection of portrait essays, The Long Weeping, released with Orison Books in November 2017, won the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the essay category.

Praise for The Long Weeping:

“Traversing the full range of human experiences with grace, The Long Weeping insists that solace awaits on the other side of even the blackest tumult, if only it can be perceived and grasped.”

Foreword Reviews, starred review

Jessie’s second novel, My Radio Radio, was published by Vandalia Press, the creative imprint of West Virginia University Press, in 2016.

And her debut novel Glorybound  (WordFarm) won the 2012 Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize with ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards.

For the latest news on all of Jessie’s publications and readings, check the News & Events page.

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