Alumna Amy Feltman '16 Releases Debut Novel, 'Upcoming Events'

Alumna Amy Feltman '16 released her debut novel Willa & Hesper, published through Grand Central Publishing. Book launch and reading dates are coming up in February.

Willa & Hesper is a novel about two young women who fall in love, fall apart, and unwittingly take the same path to mend their broken hearts, seeking answers in their ancestral lands of Tbilisi, Georgia and at war sites of Germany. The novel deals with queerness, familial connections, and the experience of coming of age in uncertain times. An excerpt from the book was published in online journal Cosmonauts Avenue.

“… [A] deep and intimate portrait of two queer women in their mid-20s who come of age in New York while navigating—or refusing to navigate—their relationships to privilege, family, identity, and faith…. [A] moving glimpse into 21st-century queer womanhood.” - Kirkus Reviews

Feltman graduated from Vassar College in 2010 and earned her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University in 2016, where she was also a Creative Writing Graduate Teaching Fellow. She has worked at Poets & Writers Magazine since 2014. She received a fellowship to attend the Disquiet Literary Conference in 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal. Her short story, "Speculoos," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. She lives with her partner in Astoria, New York.