"There is a saying in Baltimore," said the sage himself, H.L. Mencken, "that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good." The same can be said of the different short pieces of prose collected in City Sages: Baltimore. Here are thirty-six ways to create literary art in Baltimore, and all of them are good. Edited by Jen Michalski, this first-ever anthology of some of Baltimore's best writers includes both famous and not-yet-famous scribes, both dead and alive. Michalski's objective was to represent an array of writers over a period of time who were born in Baltimore or lived in the city. The anthology includes pieces by seminal writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neal Hurston, Frederick Douglass, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; contemporary writers such as Laura Lippman, Anne Tyler, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Kimball, Alice McDermott, Jessica Anya Blau, and Rafael Alvarez; and emerging writers such as Rosalia Scalia, Caryn Coyle, Joe Young, and Adam Robinson.
Jen Michalski is from Baltimore. Her novel THE TIDE KING is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (2013; winner of the Big Moose Prize), and her collection of novellas, COULD YOU BE WITH HER NOW, is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013). She is the author of two collections of fiction, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (So New, 2007) and FROM HERE (Aqueous Books, 2013). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also is the editor of the anthology CITY SAGES: BALTIMORE (CityLit Press 2010), which won a 2010 "Best of Baltimore" award from Baltimore Magazine. Finally, she is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, a co-host of the monthly reading series The 510 Readings and the biannual Lit Show in Baltimore, and interviews writers at The Nervous Breakdown.
