The Lake Huron Mermaid
Those readers who yearned for another Great Lakes Mermaid book get their wish! If you read the award-winning Lake Michigan Mermaid, you now have the opportunity to add another mermaid to your reading pleasure with the Lake Huron Mermaid, a tale of lost sisters, lost amulets, underwater sinkholes and new found love of Big Water, your beloved Lake Huron.
Anne-Marie Oomen and Linda Nemec Foster will return to the Roethke House for a unique presentation on the new Lake Huron Mermaid, including writing prompts and ideas. Join them for a program that will intrigue and fascinate you.
These authors each have a long history of successful presentations, and look forward to connecting with their Saginaw and Midland readers.
ABOUT LINDA NEMEC FOSTER
Linda Nemec Foster is an award-winning poet, writer, literary presenter, and community advocate. Foster has published 14 collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds (finalist for the ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year), The Blue Divide, Bone Country, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (with Anne-Marie Oomen and Meridith Ridl: a 2019 Michigan Notable Book). Her most recent book, The Lake Huron Mermaid (another collaboration with Oomen and Ridl), was published in 2024 and was a semi-finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Book Award. Foster’s work appears in numerous magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Poetry Daily, Paterson Literary Review, Vox Populi, Witness, Interim, and 2022 Best Small Fictions Anthology. Her poetry has also appeared in anthologies in the US. and UK; been translated in Europe; been performed on stage and in video; and has inspired original music compositions by jazz musicians and folk artists. She has received numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (New Jersey), Fish Anthology (Ireland), and the Academy of American Poets. In 2023, she won first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. Two of her recent books, Bone Country and The Blue Divide, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Bone Country was selected a Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Awards for Poetry in 2024. The inaugural Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids (2003-05), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
ABOUT ANNE-MARIE OOMEN
Anne-Marie Oomen received the Michigan Author Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2023-24. As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), Michigan Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY award. The Long Fields, (Cornerstone Press), is her most recent essay collection. Love, Sex and 4-H, (Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, (Michigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture. She wrote Uncoded Women (poetry) and co-wrote the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid and Lake Huron Mermaid with poet, Linda Nemec Foster. She edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (Michigan Notable Book). She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president and current board member of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Interlochen Writers Retreat. She and her husband, David Early, have built their handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com