Jennifer A Sutherland

House of Myth and Necessity is here! Preorder your copy at River River Books or Bookshop. Or Amazon, if you must. Please support small presses. They need your support now more than ever.

I will be reading at AWP at a couple of venues and I’ll share that information with you shortly. I also hope to be leading a literary walk around Baltimore to see Gertrude Stein’s former home and Emmanuel Episcopal, a beautiful church in Mount Vernon where Edna St. Vincent Millay once read.

And! I will be joining Moira Egan at Enoch Pratt’s Central Branch downtown to read and discuss our books. March 11th, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the Poe Room. Please join us and bring alllll your questions about fierce Greek mythological women. More info here. See you soon.

Frostburg, MD

October 23, 2025 7 p.m.

I’ll be reading from Bullet Points and my forthcoming collection, House of Myth and Necessity. Thanks so much to Jennifer Browne and the Frostburg State University Center for Literary Arts for putting this together.

Releasing in February 2026!

For release in February 2026. This collection has been in the works for years. I am excited to bring it to you.

By J.D. Ho

I wrote it about a year ago. It appeared the day after Election Day. It’s about questions.

Asked, Not Answered

Next Friday, October 17th I get to join the amazing Sean Thomas Dougherty, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, and Sarah Carson to talk about writing between literary genres. Find us in the lecture hall at the McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University.

At 11:15 a.m. where I’ll join Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer, Joseph Ross, and moderator Fran Abrams to talk poetry in the Edgar Allen Poe Pavilion. More info here.

SPD is winding down, or I should say, SPD sent out an email without warning to small presses across the country last week announcing that it has closed its doors. I have lawyer thoughts about all of this that I will keep to myself, the better part of valor being discretion, but poet-Jennifer is here to ask you to buy directly from small presses.

Academic, independent and small presses are where you will find brave, genre-evasive, smart, funny, really serious, really joyful, deeply truthful, deeply ironic work. It might be all those things at once. It might be agented. It might be stuff agents don’t know how to sell or wouldn’t want to try to sell. It will not be bland, it will not be stuff that’s engineered to satisfy a focus group. I don’t really want to read books that have been market-tested to death. If you are here, you probably don’t either. Survival of this segment of the literary market means the survival of small and indie presses.

Order from them directly. Presses make the most money that way; Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and distributors take a cut on profit margins that are already very small. Adam Smith-style economic principles don’t hold up very well in publishing for a variety of reasons, and the reluctance of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to involve itself in, oh, much of anything at all anymore hasn’t helped. If small presses die, we will read what the Big 5 decide we want to read, and I suspect that will mean cozies, self help, thrillers, and . . . you know what? I love a good cozy. I have no beef with cozies. But I also want work that challenges, and you should too.

Keep good books coming by supporting small presses. Buy books. Read them. Then buy more. Be an invisible hand in the publishing market but an invisible hand for good.

River River Books is a great place to start. Or start somewhere else. Just support small presses, and thanks.