21 September 2023 Best-Seller from Seneca Review Books By Andrew Wickenden '09

Published by Seneca Review Books, Katherine Indermaur’s full-length lyric essay recently appeared at no. 10 on SPD’s nonfiction bestseller list.  

I/I by Katherine Indermaur, which was published in 2022 by Seneca Review Books after winning the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, appeared on Small Press Distribution’s nonfiction bestseller’s list this summer.

Earlier in 2023, the book was selected by a panel of judges for the Colorado Book Award in Poetry.

As the publisher notes, “Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one’s own reflection. Indermaur's essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirmation to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song."

Since 2018, Seneca Review Books has facilitated the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, a biennial book series to encourage and support innovative work in the essay. Cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and “beyond category” projects are all within the ambit of the contest.

Seneca Review Books is an imprint of Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, which has also published Seneca Review, the Colleges’ internationally distributed literary magazine, for more than 50 years. Known as the birthplace of the Lyric Essay, the magazine was an early champion of multimodal and hybrid-forms writing. Seneca Review has also published special issues on translation, on writing about disability and on writing that is “beyond category.” The anthology We Might As Well Call it the Lyric Essay is a seminal text in creative nonfiction. The journal releases a fall and spring issue every year, except during the fall of even-numbered years, when the press publishes the book prize’s winner in lieu of a fall issue. 

Learn more about Seneca Review.

Top: Above, Katherine Indermaur accepts the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for her full-length lyric essay I/I, published by Seneca Review Books.