Waveland

Fiction. African American Studies. Jewish Studies. As Beth Fine would tell her daughter years after Freedom Summer, back in 1964, she was the girl who did everything wrong. She takes part in a wade-in to desegregate a public pool, and almost drowns. When she joins Northern volunteers to staff Freedom Schools and register voters in Mississippi, she speeds down a highway, hits a cow, and ends up in jail for prostitution. Beth believes in questioning authority, and her courage and commitment to social justice both define her and lead to her undoing. Alienated from her family, she still finds herself as an outsider in a movement that exposes the limitations of her good intentions. As she strives to transcend these limitations, her commitment deepens, her questions change, and the nature of authority and justice become harder to determine.

"There has been surprisingly little fiction about the endlessly fascinating, necessary history of the civil rights movement, but WAVELAND is a compelling addition to that short bookshelf. In a variety of voices, Simone Zelitch has caught the complexity, the satisfactions, and the contradictions of those urgent times, and she's quite remarkably given us more than a little of the generations before and after. Brave actions have consequences and this moving novel does honor to those who bore them." Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Civil Wars, winner of the Janet Kafka Prize

Simone Zelitch is the author of the novels WAVELAND (The Head & The Hand Press, 2015), The Confession of Jack Straw, Moses in Sinai, and Louisa, which was the recipient of the Goldberg Prize in Emerging Jewish Fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hanukah Lights. Recent honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction, and residences at the Edward Albee Barn and Yaddo. She established a Creative Writing program at Community College of Philadelphia and currently coordinates their new Degree in English. A new novel, Judenstaat, is forthcoming from Tor/Forge books in Summer 2016.